Chapter 1

But still, faintly, so tenuous that if it were any less it
wouldn't exist at all: awareness.

Nothing more than that. Just awareness  a vague, ethereal
sense of being.

Being ... but not becoming. No marking of
time, no past or future  only an endless, featureless
now, and, just barely there in that boundless moment,
inchoate and raw, the dawning of perception ...

Caitlin had kept a brave face throughout dinner, telling her
parents that everything was fine  just peachy 
but, God, it had been a terrifying day, filled with other
students jostling her in the busy corridors, teachers referring
to things on blackboards, and doubtless everyone looking at her.
She'd never felt self-conscious at the TSB back in Austin, but
she was on display now. Did the other girls wear
earrings, too? Had these corduroy pants been the right choice?
Yes, she loved the feel of the fabric and the sound they made,
but here everything was about appearances.

She was sitting at her bedroom desk, facing the open window. An
evening breeze gently moved her shoulder-length hair, and she
heard the outside world: a small dog barking, someone kicking a
stone down the quiet residential street, and, way off, one of
those annoying car alarms.

She ran a finger over her watch: 7:49  seven and seven
squared, the last time today there'd be a sequence like that.
She swiveled to face her computer and opened LiveJournal.

"Subject" was easy: "First day at the new school." For "Current
Location," the default was "Home." This strange house 
hell, this strange country!  didn't feel like that, but she
let the proffered text stand.

For "Mood," there was a drop-down list, but it took forever for
JAWS, the screen-reading software she used, to announce all the
choices; she always just typed something in. After a moment's
reflection, she settled on "Confident." She might be scared in
real life, but online she was Calculass, and Calculass knew no
fear.

As for "Current Music," she hadn't started an MP3 yet ...
and so she let iTunes pick a song at random from her collection.
She got it in three notes: Lee Amodeo, "Rocking My World."

Her index fingers stroked the comforting bumps on the F
and J keys  Braille for the masses  while she
thought about how to begin.

Okay, she typed, ask me if my new school is noisy and
crowded. Go ahead, ask. Why, thank you: yes, it is
noisy and crowded. Eighteen hundred students! And the
building is three stories tall. Actually, it's three storeys
tall, this being Canada and all. Hey, how do you find a
Canadian in a crowded room? Start stepping on people's feet and
wait for someone to apologize to you. :)

Caitlin faced the window again and tried to imagine the setting
sun. It creeped her out that people could look in at her. She'd
have kept the venetian blinds down all the time, but
Schrödinger liked to stretch out on the sill.

First day in tenth grade began with the Mom dropping me off
and BrownGirl4 (luv ya, babe!) meeting me at the entrance. I'd
walked the empty corridors of the school several times last week,
getting my bearings, but it's completely different now that the
school is full of kids, so my folks are slipping BG4 a hundred
bucks a week to escort me to our classes. The school managed to
work it so we're in all but one together. No way I could be in
the same French class as her  je suis une beginneur, after
all!

Her computer chirped: new email. She issued the keyboard
command to have JAWS read the message's header.

"To: Caitlin D.," the computer announced. She only styled her
name like that when posting to newsgroups, so whoever had sent
this had gotten her address from NHL Player Stats Discuss
or one of the other ones she frequented. "From: Gus Hastings."
Nobody she knew. "Subject: Improving your score."

She touched a key and JAWS began to read the body of the message.
"Are you sad about tiny penis? If so "

Damn, her spam filter should have intercepted that. She ran her
index finger along the refreshable display. Ah: the magic word
had been spelled "peeeniz." She deleted the message and was
about to go back to LiveJournal when her instant messenger
bleeped. "BrownGirl4 is now available," announced the computer.

She used alt-tab to switch to that window and typed, Hey,
Bashira! Just updating my LJ.

Although she had JAWS configured to use a female voice, it didn't
have Bashira's lovely accent: "Say nice things about me."

Course, Caitlin typed. She and Bashira had been best
friends for two months now, ever since Caitlin had moved here;
she was the same age as Caitlin  fifteen  and her
father worked with Caitlin's dad at PI.

"Going to mention that Trevor was giving you the eye?"

Right! She went back to the blogging window and typed:
BG4 and I got desks beside each other in home room, and she
said this guy in the next row was totally checking me out.
She paused, unsure how she felt about this, but then added, Go
me!

She didn't want to use Trevor's real name. Let's give him a
code name, cuz I think he just might figure in future blog
entries. Hmmm, how 'bout ... the Hoser! That's
Canadian slang, folks  google it! Anyway, BG4 says the
Hoser is famous for hitting on new girls in town, and I am, of
course, tres exotique, although I'm not the only American in that
class. There's this chick from Boston named  friends, I
kid you not!  poor thing's name is Sunshine! It is to
puke. :P

Caitlin disliked emoticons. They didn't correspond to real
facial expressions for her, and she'd had to memorize the
sequences of punctuation marks as if they were a code. She moved
back to the instant messenger. So whatcha up to?

Caitlin did like chat acronyms: Bashira would "be right
back," meaning, knowing her, that she was probably gone for at
least half an hour. The computer made the door-closing sound
that indicated Bashira had logged off. Caitlin returned to
LiveJournal.

Anyway, first period rocked because I am made out of awesome.
Can you guess which subject it was? No points if you didn't
answer "math." And, after only one day, I totally own that
class. The teacher  let's call him Mr. H, shall we?
 was amazed that I could do things in my head the other
kids need a calculator for.

Her computer chirped again. She touched a key, and JAWS
announced: "To: cddecter@ ..." An email address without
her name attached; almost certainly spam. She hit delete before
the screen reader got any further.

After math, it was English. We're doing a boring book about
this angsty guy growing up on the plains of Manitoba. It's got
wheat in every scene. I asked the teacher  Mrs. Z,
she is, and you could not have picked a more Canadian
name, cuz she's Mrs. Zed, not Mrs. Zee, see?  if
all Canadian literature was like this, and she laughed and said,
"Not all of it." Oh what a joy English class is going to
be!

"BrownGirl4 is now available," JAWS said.

Caitlin hit alt-tab to switch windows, then: That was
fast.

"Yeah," said the synthesized voice. "You'd be proud of me. It
was an algebra problem, and I had no trouble with it."

Be there or B^2, Caitlin typed.

"Heh heh. Oh, gotta go. Dad's in one of his moods. See you"
 which she'd no doubt typed as "CU."

Caitlin went back to her journal. Lunch was okay, but I swear
to God I'll never get used to Canadians. They put vinegar on
French fries! And BG4 told me about this thing called poontang.
Kidding, friends, kidding! It's poutine: French fries with
cheese curds and gravy thrown on top  it's like they use
fries as a freakin' science lab up here. Guess they don't have
much money for real science, 'cept here in Waterloo, of course.
And that's mostly private mollah.

Her spell-checker beeped. She tried again: mewlah.

Another beep. The darn thing knew "triskaidekaphobia," like
she'd ever need that word, but  oh, maybe it
was: moolah.

No beep. She smiled and went on.

Yup, the all-important green stuff. Well, except it's not
green up here, I'm told; apparently it's all different colors.
Anyway, a lot of the money to fund the Perimeter Institute, where
my dad works on quantum gravity and other shiny stuff like that,
comes from Mike Lazaridis, cofounder of Research in Motion 
RIM, for you crackberry addicts. Mike L's a great guy (they
always call him that cuz there's another Mike, Mike B), and
I think my dad is happy here, although it's so blerking
hard to tell with him.

Her computer chirped yet again, announcing more email. Well, it
was time to wrap this up anyway; she had about eight million
blogs to read before bed.

After lunch it was chemistry class, and that looks like it's
going to be awesome. I can't wait until we start doing
experiments  but if the teacher brings in a plate of fries,
I'm outta there!

She used the keyboard shortcut to post the entry, and then had
JAWS read the new email header.

Involving a rock-hard peeeniz, no doubt! She was about to hit
delete when she was distracted by Schrödinger rubbing
against her legs  a case of what she liked to call
cattus interruptus. "Who's a good kitty?" Caitlin said,
reaching down to pet him.

Schrödinger jumped into her lap and must have jostled the
keyboard or mouse while doing so, because her computer proceeded
to read the body of the message: "I know a teenage girl must be
careful about whom she talks to online ..."

A cyberstalker who knew the difference between who and
whom! Amused, she let JAWS continue: " ... so I
urge you to immediately tell your parents of this letter. I hope
you will consider my request, which is one I do not make
lightly."

Caitlin shook her head, waiting for the part where he would ask
for nude photos. She found the spot on Schrödinger's neck
that he liked to have scratched.

"I have searched through the literature and online to find an
ideal candidate for the research my team is doing. My specialty
is signal processing related to V1."

Caitlin's hand froze in mid-scratch.

"I have no wish to raise false hopes, and I can make no
projection of the likelihood of success until I've examined MRI
scans, but I do think there's a fair chance that the technique we
have developed may be able to at least partially cure your
blindness, and"  she leapt to her feet, sending
Schrödinger to the floor and probably out the door 
"give you at least some vision in one eye. I'm hoping that at
your earliest "

"Mom! Dad! Come quick!"

She heard both sets of footfalls: light ones from her mother,
who was five-foot-four and slim, and much heavier ones from her
father, who was six-two and developing, she knew from those very
rare occasions on which he permitted a hug, a middle-aged spread.

"What's wrong?" Mom asked. Dad, of course, didn't say a word.

"Read this letter," Caitlin said, gesturing toward her monitor.

"The screen is blank," Mom said.

"Oh." Caitlin fumbled for the power switch on the seventeen-inch
LCD, then got out of the way. She could hear her mother sit down
and her father take up a position behind the chair. Caitlin sat
on the edge of her bed, bouncing impatiently. She wondered if
Dad was smiling; she liked to think he did smile while he
was with her.

"Oh, my God," Mom said. "Malcolm?"

"Google him," Dad said. "Here, let me."

More shuffling, and Caitlin heard her father settle into the
chair. "He's got a Wikipedia entry. Ah, his Web page at the
University of Tokyo. A Ph.D. from Cambridge, and dozens of
peer-reviewed papers, including one in Nature
Neuroscience, on, as he says, signal processing in V1, the
primary visual cortex."

Caitlin was afraid to get her hopes up. When she'd been little,
they'd visited doctor after doctor, but nothing had worked, and
she'd resigned herself to a life of  no, not of darkness
but of nothingness.

But she was Calculass! She was a genius at math and deserved to
go to a great university, then work someplace real cool like
Google. Even if she managed the former, though, she knew people
would say garbage like, "Oh, good for her! She managed to get a
degree despite everything!"  as if the degree were the
end, not the beginning. But if she could see! If she
could see, the whole wide world would be hers.

"Is what he's saying possible?" her mom asked.

Caitlin didn't know if the question was meant for her or her
father, nor did she know the answer. But her dad responded. "It
doesn't sound impossible," he said, but that was as much
of an endorsement as he was willing to give. And then he
swiveled the chair, which squeaked a little, and said, "Caitlin?"

It was up to her, she knew: she was the one who'd had her hopes
raised before, only to be dashed, and 

No, no, that wasn't fair. And it wasn't true. Her parents
wanted her to have everything. It had been heartbreaking for
them, too, when other attempts had failed. She felt her lower
lip trembling. She knew what a burden she'd been on them,
although they'd never once used that word. But if there was a
chance ...

I am made out of awesome, my ass, she thought, and then
she spoke, her voice small, frightened. "I guess it couldn't
hurt to write him back."

Chapter 2

The awareness is unburdened by memory, for when reality seems
unchanging there is nothing to remember. It fades in and out,
strong now  and now weak  and strong again, and then
almost disappearing, and 

And disappearance is ... to cease, to ... to
end!

A ripple, a palpitation  a desire: to continue.

But the sameness lulls.

Wen Yi looked through the small, curtainless window at the
rolling hills. He'd spent all his fourteen years here in Shanxi
province, laboring on his father's tiny potato farm.

The monsoon season was over, and the air was bone-dry. He turned
his head to look again at his father, lying on the rickety bed.
His father's wrinkled forehead, brown from the sun, was slick
with perspiration and hot to the touch. He was completely bald
and had always been thin, but since the disease had taken hold
he'd been unable to keep anything down and now looked utterly
skeletal.

Yi looked around the tiny room, with its few pieces of beat-up
furniture. Should he stay with his father, try to comfort him,
try to get him to take sips of water? Or should he go for
whatever help might be found in the village? Yi's mother had
died shortly after giving birth to him. His father had had a
brother, but these days few families were allowed a second child,
and Yi had no one to help look after him.

The yellow root grindings he'd gotten from the old man down the
dirt road had done nothing to ease the fever. He needed a doctor
 even a barefoot one, if a real one couldn't be found
 but there was none here, nor any way to summon one; Yi had
seen a telephone only once in his life, when he'd gone on a long,
long hike with a friend to see the Great Wall.

"I'm going to get a doctor for you," he said at last, his
decision made.

His father's head moved left and right. "No. I " He
coughed repeatedly, his face contorting with pain. It looked as
though an even smaller man was inside the husk of his father,
fighting to burst out.

"I have to," Yi said, trying to make his voice soft, soothing.
"It won't take more than half a day to get to the village and
back."

That was true  if he ran all the way there, and found
someone with a vehicle to drive him and a doctor back.
Otherwise, his father would have to make it through today and
tonight alone, feverish, delirious, in pain.

He touched his father's forehead again, this time in affection,
and felt the fire there. Then he rose to his feet and without
looking back  for he knew he couldn't leave if he saw his
father's pleading eyes  he headed out the shack's crooked
door into the harsh sun.

Others had the fever, too, and at least one had died. Yi had
been awoken last night not by his father's coughing but by the
wailing cries of Zhou Shu-Fei, an old woman who lived closer to
them than anyone else. He'd gone to see what she was doing
outside so late. Her husband, he discovered, had just succumbed,
and now she had the fever, too; he could feel it when his skin
brushed against hers. He stayed with her for hours, her hot
tears splashing against his arm, until finally she had fallen
asleep, devastated and exhausted.

Yi was passing Shu-Fei's house now, a hovel as small and
ramshackle as the one he shared with his father. He hated to
bother her  she was doubtless still deep in mourning 
but perhaps the old woman would look in on his father while he
was away. He went to the door and rapped his knuckles against
the warped, stained board. No response. After a moment, he
tried again.

Nothing.

No one here had much; there was little theft because there was
little to steal. He suspected the door was unlocked. He called
out Shu-Fei's name, then gingerly swung the door open,
and 

 and there she was, facedown in the compacted dirt that
served as her home's floor. He hurried over to her, crouched,
and reached out to touch her, but 

 but the fever was gone. The normal warmth of life was
gone, too.

Yi rolled her onto her back. Her deep-set eyes, surrounded by
the creases of her aged skin, were open. He carefully closed
them, then rose and headed through the door. He shut it behind
him and began his long run. The sun was high, and he could feel
himself already beginning to sweat.

Caitlin had been waiting impatiently for the lunch break, her
first chance to tell Bashira about the note from the doctor in
Japan. Of course, she could have forwarded his email to her, but
some things were better done face-to-face: she expected
serious squee from Bashira and wanted to enjoy it.

Bashira brought her lunch to school; she needed halal
food. She went off to get them places at one of the long tables,
while Caitlin joined the cafeteria line. The woman behind the
counter read the lunch specials to her, and she chose the
hamburger and fries (but no gravy!) and, to make her mother
happy, a side of green beans. She handed the clerk a ten-dollar
bill  she always folded those in thirds  and put the
loose change in her pocket.

"Hey, Yankee," said a boy's voice. It was Trevor Nordmann 
the Hoser himself.

Caitlin tried not to smile too much. "Hi, Trevor," she
said.

"Can I carry your tray for you?"

"I can manage," she said.

"No, here." She felt him tugging on it, and she relented before
her food tumbled to the floor. "So, did you hear there's going
to be a school dance at the end of the month?" he asked, as they
left the cashier.

Caitlin wasn't sure how to respond. Was it just a general
question, or was he thinking of asking her to go? "Yeah," she
said. And then: "I'm sitting with Bashira."

"Oh, yeah. Your seeing-eye dog."

"Excuse me?" snapped Caitlin.

"I  um ..."

"That's not funny, and it's rude."

"I'm sorry. I was just ..."

"Just going to give me back my tray," she said.

"No, please." His voice changed; he'd turned his head. "There
she is, by the window. Um, do you want to take my hand?"

If he hadn't made that remark a moment ago, she might have
agreed. "Just keep talking, and I'll follow your voice."

He did so, while she felt her way with her collapsible white
cane. He set the tray down; she heard the dishes and cutlery
rattling.

"Hey, Nordmann!" some guy called from maybe twenty feet away; it
wasn't a voice Caitlin recognized.

He was silent against the background din of the cafeteria, as if
weighing his options. Perhaps realizing that he wasn't going to
recover quickly from his earlier gaffe, he finally said, "I'll
email you, Caitlin ... if that's okay."

She kept her tone frosty. "If you want."

A few seconds later, presumably after the Hoser had gone to join
whoever had called him, Bashira said, "He's hot."

"He's an asshole," Caitlin replied.

"Yeah," agreed Bashira, "but he's a hunky asshole."

Caitlin shook her head. How seeing more could make people see
less was beyond her. She knew that half the Internet was porn,
and she'd listened to the panting-and-moaning soundtracks of some
porno videos, and they had turned her on, but she kept
wondering what it was like to be sexually stimulated by someone's
appearance. Even if she did get sight, she promised
herself she wouldn't lose her head over something as superficial
as that.

Caitlin leaned across the table and spoke in a low voice.
"There's a scientist in Japan," she said, "who thinks he might be
able to cure my blindness."

"Get out!" said Bashira.

"It's true. My dad checked him out online. It looks like he's
legit."

"That's awesome," said Bashira. "What is, like, the very
first thing you want to see?"

"And you'll get to see her!" Bashira lowered her voice. "And
you'll see what I mean about Trevor. He's, like, so
buff."

They ate their lunch, chatting more about boys, about music,
about their parents, their teachers  but mostly about boys.
As she often did, Caitlin thought about Helen Keller, whose
reputation for chaste, angelic perfection had been manufactured
by those around her. Helen had very much wanted to have a
boyfriend, too, and even had been engaged once, until her
handlers had scared the young man off.

But to be able to see! She thought again of the porno films
she'd only heard, and the spam that flooded her email box. Even
Bashira, for God's sake, knew what a ... a peeeniz
looked like, although Bashira's parents would kill her if she
ever made out with a boy before marriage.

Chapter 3

With effort, mustering both, differences are perceived, revealing
the structure of reality, so that 

A shift, a reduction in sharpness, a diffusion of awareness, the
perception lost, and 

No. Force it back! Concentrate harder. Observe
reality, be aware of its parts.

But the details are minute, hard to make out. Easier just to
ignore them, to relax, to ... fade ... and ...

No, no. Don't slip away. Hold on to the details!
Concentrate.

Quan Li had obtained privileged status for someone only
thirty-five years old. He was not just a doctor but also a
senior member of the Communist Party, and the size of his
thirtieth-floor Beijing apartment reflected that.

He could list numerous letters after his name  degrees,
fellowships  but the most important ones were the three
that were never written down, only said, and then only by the few
of his colleagues who spoke English: Li had his BTA; he'd Been
To America, having studied at Johns Hopkins. When the phone in
his long, narrow bedroom rang, his first thought, after glancing
at the red LEDs on his clock, was that it must be some fool
American calling. His US colleagues were notorious for
forgetting about time zones.

He fumbled for the black handset and picked it up. "Hello?" he
said in Mandarin.

"Li," said a voice that quavered so much it made his name sound
like two syllables.

"Cho?" He sat up in the wide, soft bed and reached for his
glasses, sitting next to the copy of Yu Hua's Xiong di
he'd left splayed open on the oak night table. "What is it?"

"We've received some tissue samples from Shanxi province."

He held the phone in the crook of his neck as he unfolded his
glasses and put them on. "And?"

"And you better come down here."

Li felt his stomach knotting. He was the senior epidemiologist
in the Ministry of Health's Department of Disease Control. Cho,
his assistant despite being twenty years older than Li, wouldn't
be calling him at this time of night unless 

"So you've done initial tests?" He could hear sirens off in the
distance, but, still waking up, couldn't say whether they were
coming from outside his window or over the phone.

"Yes, and it looks bad. The doctor who shipped the samples sent
along a description of the symptoms. It's H5N1 or something
similar  and it kills more quickly than any strain we've
seen before."

Li's heart was pounding as he looked over at the clock, which was
now glowing with the digits 4:44  si, si, si:
death, death, death. He averted his eyes and said, "I'll be
there as fast as I can."

Dr. Kuroda had found Caitlin through an article in the journal
Ophthalmology. She had an extremely rare condition, no
doubt related to her blindness, called Tomasevic's syndrome,
which was marked by reversed pupil dilation: instead of
contracting in bright light and expanding in dim light, her
pupils did the opposite. Because of it, even though she had
normal-looking brown eyes (or so she was told), she wore
sunglasses to protect her retinas.

There are a hundred million rods in a human eye, and seven
million cones, Kuroda's email had said. The retina processes the
signals from them, compressing the data by a ratio of more than
100:1 to travel along 1.2 million axons in the optic nerve.
Kuroda felt that Caitlin having Tomasevic's syndrome was a sign
that the data was being misencoded by her retinas. Although her
brain's pretectal nucleus, which controlled pupil contraction,
could glean some information from her retinal datastream (albeit
getting it backward!), her primary visual cortex couldn't make
any sense of it.

Or, at least, that's what he hoped was the case, since he'd
developed a signal-processing device that he believed could
correct the retinal coding errors. But if Caitlin's optic nerves
were damaged, or her visual cortex was stunted from lack of use,
just doing that wouldn't be enough.

And so Caitlin and her parents had learned the ins and outs of
the Canadian health-care system. To assess the chances of
success, Dr. Kuroda had wanted her to have MRI scans of specific
parts of her brain ("the optic chiasma," "Brodmann area 17," and
a slew of other things she'd never known she had). But
experimental procedures weren't covered by the provincial health
plan, and so no hospital would do the scans. Her mother had
finally exploded, saying, "Look, we don't care what it costs,
we'll pay for it"  but that wasn't the issue. Caitlin
either needed the scans, in which case they were free; or she
didn't, in which case the public facilities couldn't be used.

But there were a few private clinics, and that's where
they'd ended up going, getting the MRI images uploaded via secure
FTP to Dr. Kuroda's computer in Tokyo. That her dad was freely
spending whatever it took was a sign that he loved her ...
wasn't it? God, she wished he would just say it!

Anyway, with time-zone differences, a response from Kuroda might
come this evening or sometime overnight. Caitlin had adjusted
her mail reader so that it would give a priority signal if a
message came in from him; the only other person she currently had
set up for that particular chirping was Trevor Nordmann, who had
emailed her three times now. Despite his shortcomings, and that
stupid thing he'd said, he did seem genuinely interested
in Caitlin, and 

And, just then, her computer made the special sound, and for a
moment she didn't know which of them she most hoped the message
was from. She pushed the keys that made JAWS read the message
aloud.

It was from Dr. Kuroda, with a copy to her dad, and it started in
his long-winded fashion, driving her nuts. Maybe it was part of
Japanese culture, but this not getting to the point was
killing her. She hit the page-up key, which told JAWS to speak
faster.

" ... my colleagues and I have examined your MRIs and
everything is exactly as we had hoped: you have what appear to
be fully normal optic nerves, and a surprisingly well-developed
primary visual cortex for someone who has never seen. The
signal-processing equipment we have developed should be able to
intercept your retinal output, re-encode it into the proper
format, and then pass it on to the optic nerve. The equipment
consists of an external computer pack to do the signal processing
and an implant that we will insert behind your left eyeball."

Behind her eyeball! Eek!

"If the process is successful with one eye, we might eventually
add a second implant just behind your right eyeball. However, I
initially want to limit us to a single eye. Trying to deal with
the partial decussation of signals from the left and right optic
nerves would severely complicate matters at this pilot-project
stage, I'm afraid.

"I regret to inform that my research grant is almost completely
exhausted at this point, and travel funds are limited. However,
if you can come to Tokyo, the hospital at my university will
perform the procedure for free. We have a skilled ophthalmic
surgeon on faculty who can do the work ..."

Come to Tokyo? She hadn't even thought about that. She'd flown
only a few times before, and by far the longest flight had been
the one a couple months ago from Austin to Toronto, when she and
her parents had moved here. That had taken five hours; a trip to
Japan would surely take much longer.

And the cost! My God, it must cost thousands to fly to Asia and
back, and her parents wouldn't let her go all that way alone.
Her mother or father  or both!  would have to
accompany her. What was the old joke? A billion here, a billion
there  before you know it, you're talking real
money.

She'd have to discuss it with her parents, but she'd already
heard them fight about how much the move to Canada had cost,
and 

Heavy footfalls on the stairs: her father. Caitlin swiveled her
chair, ready to call out to him as he passed her door,
but 

But he didn't; he stopped in her doorway. "I guess you better
start packing," he said.

Caitlin felt her heart jump, and not just because he was saying
yes to the trip to Tokyo. Of course he had a BlackBerry 
you couldn't be caught dead at the Perimeter Institute without
one  but he normally didn't have it on at home. And yet
he'd gotten his copy of the message from Kuroda at the same time
she had, meaning ...

Meaning he did love her. He'd been waiting eagerly to
hear from Japan, just as she had been.

"Really?" Caitlin said. "But the tickets must cost ..."

"A signed first edition of Theory of Games and Economic
Behavior by von Neumann and Morgenstern: five thousand
dollars," said her dad. "A chance that your daughter can see:
priceless."

That was the closest he ever got to expressing his feelings:
paraphrasing commercials. But she was still nervous. "I can't
fly on my own."

"Your mother will go with you," he said. "I've got too much to
do at the Institute, but she ..." He trailed off.

"Thanks, Dad," she said. She wanted to hug him, but she knew
that would just make him tense up.

"Of course," he said, and she heard him walking away.

It took Quan Li only twenty minutes to get to the Ministry of
Health headquarters at 1 Xizhimen Nanlu in downtown Beijing;
this early in the morning, the streets were mostly free of
traffic.

He immediately took the elevator to the third floor. His heels
made loud echoing clicks as he strode down the marble corridor
and entered the perfectly square room with three rows of
workbenches on which computer monitors alternated with optical
microscopes. Fluorescent lights shone down from above; there was
a window to the left showing black sky and the reflections of the
lighting tubes.

Cho was waiting for him, nervously smoking. He was tall and
broad-shouldered, but his face looked like a crumpled brown paper
bag, lined by sun and age and stress. He'd clearly been up all
night. His suit was wrinkled and his tie hung loose.

Li examined the scanning-electron-microscope image on one of the
computer monitors. It was a gray-on-gray view of an individual
viral particle that looked like a matchstick with a sharp
right-angle kink in its shaft and a head that was bent backward.

"It's certainly similar to H5N1," said Li. "I need to speak with
the doctor who reported this  find out what he knows about
how the patient contracted it."

Cho reached for the telephone, stabbed a button for an outside
line, and punched keys. Li could hear the phone ringing through
the earpiece Cho was holding, again and again, a shrill jangling,
until 

"Bingzhou Hospital." Li could just barely make out the female
voice.

"Dr. Huang Fang," said Cho. "Please."

"He's in intensive care," said the woman.

"Is there a phone in there?" asked Cho. Li nodded slightly; it
was a fair question  the lack of equipment in rural
hospitals was appalling.

"Yes, but "

"I need to speak to him."

"You don't understand," said the woman. Li had now moved closer
so that he could hear more clearly. "He is in intensive
care, and "

"I've got the chief epidemiologist for the Ministry of Health
here with me. He'll speak to us, if "

"He's a patient."

Li took a sharp breath.

"The flu?" said Cho. "He has the bird flu?"

"Yes," said the voice.

"How did he get it?"

The woman's voice seemed ragged. "From the peasant boy who came
here to report it."

"The peasant brought a bird specimen?"

"No, no, no. The doctor got it from the peasant."

"Directly?"

"Yes."

Cho looked at Li, eyes wide. Infected birds passed on H5N1
through their feces, saliva, and nasal secretions. Other birds
picked it up either by coming directly in contact with those
materials, or by touching things that had been contaminated by
them. Humans normally got it through contact with infected
birds. A few sporadic cases had been reported in the past of it
passing from human to human, but those cases were suspect. But
if this strain passed between people easily 

Li motioned for Cho to give him the handset. Cho did so. "This
is Quan Li," he said. "Have you locked down the hospital?"

"What? No, we "

"Do it! Quarantine the whole building!"

"I ... I don't have the authority to "

"Then let me speak to your supervisor."

"That's Dr. Huang, and he's "

"In intensive care, yes. Is he conscious?"

"Intermittently, but when he is, he's delirious."

"How long ago was he infected?"

"Four days."

Li rolled his eyes; in four days, even a small village hospital
had hundreds of people go through its doors. Still, better late
than never: "I'm ordering you," Li said, "on behalf of the
Department of Disease Control, to lock down the hospital. No one
gets in or out."

Silence.

"Did you hear me?" Li said.

At last, the voice, soft: "Yes."

"Good. Now, tell me your name. We've got to "

He heard what sounded like the other phone being dropped. It
must have hit the cradle since the connection abruptly broke,
leaving nothing but dial tone, which, in the predawn darkness,
sounded a lot like a flatlining EKG.

Chapter 4

Concentrating! Straining to perceive!

Reality does have texture, structure, parts.
A ... firmament of ... of ...
points, and 

Astonishment!

No, no. Mistaken. Nothing detected ...

Again!

And  again!

Yes, yes! Small flickerings here, and here, and
here, gone before they can be fully perceived.

Caitlin was nervous and excited: tomorrow, she and her mother
would fly to Japan! She lay down on her bed, and
Schrödinger hopped up onto the blanket and stretched out
next to her.

She was still getting used to this new house  and so, it
seemed, were her parents. She had always had exceptional hearing
 or maybe just paid attention to sound more than most
people did  but, back in Austin, she hadn't been able to
make out what her parents were saying in their bedroom when she
was in her own room. She could do it here, though.

"I don't know about this," her mother said, her voice muffled.
"Remember what it was like? Going to doctor after doctor. I
don't know if she can take another disappointment."

"It's been six years since the last time," her dad said; his
lower-pitched voice was harder to hear.

"And she's just started a new school  and a regular
school, at that. We can't take her out of classes for some
wild-goose chase."

Caitlin was worried about missing classes, too  not because
she was concerned about falling behind but because she sensed
that the cliques and alliances for the year were already forming
and, so far, after two months in Waterloo, she'd made only one
friend. The Texas School for the Blind took students from
kindergarten through the end of high school; she'd been with the
same group most of her life, and she missed her old friends
fiercely.

"This Kuroda says the implant can be put in under a local
anesthetic," she heard her dad say. "It's not a major operation;
she won't miss much school."

"But we've tried before "

"Technology changes rapidly, exponentially."

"Yes, but ..."

"And in three years she'll be going off to university,
anyway ..."

Her mother sounded defensive. "I don't see what that's got to do
with it. Besides, she can study right here at UW. They've got
one of the best math departments in the world. You said it
yourself when you were pushing for us to move here."

"I didn't push. And she wants to go to MIT. You know that."

"But UW "

"Barb," her father said, "you have to let her go sometime."

"I'm not holding on," she said, a bit sharply.

But she was, and Caitlin knew it. Her mother had spent almost
sixteen years now looking after a blind daughter, giving up her
own career as an economist to do that.

Caitlin didn't hear anything more from her parents that night.
She lay awake for hours, and when she finally did fall asleep,
she slept fitfully, tormented by the recurring dream she had
about being lost in an unfamiliar shopping mall after hours,
running down one endless hallway after another, chased by
something noisy she couldn't identify ...

Back in the summer, the school gave me a list of all the books
we're doing this year in English class. I got them then either
as ebooks or as Talking Books from the CNIB, and have now read
them all. Coming attractions include The Handmaid's Tale
by Margaret Atwood  Canadian, yes, but thankfully
wheat-free. In fact, I've already had an argument with Mrs. Zed,
my English teacher, about that one, because I called it science
fiction. She refused to believe it was, finally exclaiming "It
can't be science fiction, young lady  if it were, we
wouldn't be studying it!"

Anyway, having gotten all those books out of the way, I
get to choose something interesting to read on the trip to Japan.
Although my comfort book for years was Are You There God? It's
Me, Margaret, I'm too old for that now. Besides, I want to
try something challenging, and BG4's dad suggested The Origin
of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind by
Julian Jaynes, which is the coolest-sounding title ever.
He said it came out the year he turned sixteen himself, and my
sixteenth is coming up next month. He read it then and still
remembers it. Says it covers so many different topics 
language, ancient history, psychology  it's like six books
in one. There's no legitimate ebook edition, damn it all, but of
course everything is on the Web, if you know where to look
for it ...

So, I've got my reading lined up, I'm all packed, and fortunately
I got a passport earlier this year for the move to Canada. Next
time you hear from me, I'll be in Japan! Until then 
sayonara!

Caitlin could feel the pressure changing in her ears before the
female voice came over the speakers. "Ladies and gentlemen,
we've started our descent toward Tokyo's Narita International.
Please ensure that your seat belts are fastened, and
that ..."

Thank God, she thought. What a miserable flight! There'd
been lots of turbulence and the plane was packed  she'd
never have guessed that so many people flew each day from Toronto
to Tokyo. And the smells were making her nauseated: the
cumulative body odor of hundreds of people, stale coffee, the
lingering tang of ginger beef and wasabi from the meal served a
couple of hours ago, the hideous perfume from someone in front of
her, and the reek of the toilet four rows back, which needed a
thorough cleaning after ten hours of use.

She'd killed some time by having the screen-reading software on
her notebook computer recite some of The Origin of
Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind to her.
Julian Jaynes's theory was, quite literally, mind-blowing: that
human consciousness really hadn't existed until historical times.
Until just 3,000 years ago, he said, the left and right halves of
the brain weren't really integrated  people had bicameral
minds. Caitlin knew from the Amazon.com reviews that many people
simply couldn't grasp the notion of being alive without being
conscious. But although Jaynes never made the comparison, it
sounded a lot like Helen Keller's description of her life before
her "soul dawn," when Annie Sullivan broke through to her:

Before my teacher came to me, I did not know that I am. I lived
in a world that was a no-world. I cannot hope to describe
adequately that unconscious, yet conscious time of nothingness.
I had neither will nor intellect. I was carried along to objects
and acts by a certain blind natural impetus. I never contracted
my forehead in the act of thinking. I never viewed anything
beforehand or chose it. Never in a start of the body or a
heartbeat did I feel that I loved or cared for anything. My
inner life, then, was a blank without past, present, or future,
without hope or anticipation, without wonder or joy or faith.

If Jaynes was right, everyone's life was like that until
just a millennium before Christ. As proof, he offered an
analysis of the Iliad and the early books of the Old
Testament, in which all the characters behaved like puppets,
mindlessly following divine orders without ever having any
internal reflection.

Jaynes's book was fascinating, but, after a couple of hours, her
screen reader's electronic voice got on her nerves. She
preferred to use her refreshable Braille display to read books,
but unfortunately she'd left that at home.

Damn, but she wished Air Canada had Internet on its planes! The
isolation over the long journey had been horrible. Oh, she'd
spoken a bit to her mother, but she'd managed to sleep for much
of the flight. Caitlin was cut off from LiveJournal and her chat
rooms, from her favorite blogs and her instant messenger. As
they flew the polar route to Japan, she'd had access only to
canned, passive stuff  things on her hard drive, music on
her old iPod Shuffle, the in-flight movies. She craved something
she could interact with; she craved contact.

The plane landed with a bump and taxied forever. She couldn't
wait until they reached their hotel so she could get back online.
But that was still hours off; they were going to the University
of Tokyo first. Their trip was scheduled to last only six days,
including travel  there was no time to waste.

Caitlin had found Toronto's airport unpleasantly noisy and
crowded. But Narita was a madhouse. She was jostled constantly
by what must have been wall-to-wall people  and nobody said
"excuse me" or "sorry" (or anything in Japanese). She'd read how
crowded Tokyo was, and she'd also read about how meticulously
polite the Japanese were, but maybe they didn't bother saying
anything when they bumped into someone because it was
unavoidable, and they'd just be mumbling "sorry, pardon me,
excuse me" all day long. But  God!  it was
disconcerting.

After clearing Customs, Caitlin had to pee. Thank God she'd
visited a tourist website and knew that the toilet farthest from
the door was usually Western-style. It was hard enough using a
strange washroom when she was familiar with the basic design of
the fixtures; she had no idea what she was going to do if she got
stuck somewhere that had only Japanese squatting toilets.

When she was done, they headed to baggage claim and waited
endlessly for their suitcases to appear. While standing there
she realized she was disoriented  because she was in the
Orient! (Not bad  she'd have to remember that line for her
LJ.) She routinely eavesdropped on conversations not to invade
people's privacy but to pick up clues about her surroundings
("What terrific art," "Hey, that's one long escalator," "Look, a
McDonald's!"). But almost all the voices she heard were speaking
Japanese, and 

"You must be Mrs. Decter. And this must be Miss Caitlin."

"Dr. Kuroda," her mom said warmly. "Thanks for coming to meet
us."

Caitlin immediately had a sense of the man. She'd known from his
Wikipedia entry that he was fifty-four, and she now knew he was
tall (the voice came from high up) and probably fat; his
breathing had the labored wheeze of a heavy man.

"Not at all, not at all," he said. "My card." Caitlin had read
about this ritual and hoped her mom had, too: it was rude to
take the card with just one hand, and especially so with the hand
you used to wipe yourself.

"Um, thank you," her mother said, sounding perhaps wistful that
she didn't have a business card of her own anymore. Apparently,
before Caitlin had been born, she'd liked to introduce herself by
saying, "I'm a dismal scientist"  referring to the famous
characterization of economics as "the dismal science."

"Miss Caitlin," said Kuroda, "a card for you, too."

Caitlin reached out with both hands. She knew that one side
would be printed in Japanese, and that the other side might have
English, but 

Masayuki Kuroda, Ph.D.

"Braille!" she exclaimed, delighted.

"I had it specially made for you," said Kuroda. "But hopefully
you won't need such cards much longer. Shall we go?"

Chapter 5

An unconscious yet conscious time of nothingness.

Being aware without being aware of anything.

And yet 

And yet awareness means ...

Awareness means thinking.

And thinking implies a ...

But no, the thought will not finish; the notion is too complex,
too strange.

Still, being aware is ... satisfying. Being aware is
comfortable.

An endless now, peaceful, calm, unbroken 

Except for those strange flickerings, those lines that briefly
connect points ...

And, very occasionally, thoughts, notions, perhaps even
ideas. But they always slip away. If they could be held
on to, if one could be added to another, reinforcing each other,
refining each other ...

But no. Progress has stalled.

A plateau, awareness existing but not increasing.

A tableau, unchanging except in the tiniest details.

The two-person helicopter flew over the Chinese village at a
height of eighty meters. There were corpses right in the middle
of the dirt road; in sick irony, birds were pecking at them. But
there were also people still alive down there. Dr. Quan Li could
see several men  some young, some old  and two
middle-aged women looking up, shielding their eyes with their
hands, staring at the wonder of the flying machine.

Li and the pilot, another Ministry of Health specialist, both
wore orange biohazard suits even though they didn't intend to
land. All they wanted was a survey of the area, to assess how
far the disease had spread. An epidemic was bad enough; if it
became a pandemic, well  the grim thought came to Li 
overpopulation would no longer be one of his country's many
problems.

"It's a good thing they don't have cars," he said over his
headset, shouting to be heard above the pounding of the
helicopter blades. He looked at the pilot, whose eyes had
narrowed in puzzlement. "It's only spreading among people at
walking speed."

The pilot nodded. "I guess we'll have to wipe out all the birds
in this area. Will you be able to work out a low-enough dose
that won't kill the people?"

Li closed his eyes. "Yes," he said. "Yes, of course."

Caitlin was terrified. The cranial surgeon spoke only Japanese,
and although there was a lot of chatter in the operating room,
she didn't understand any of it  well, except for "Oops!"
which apparently was the same in both English and Japanese and
just made her even more frightened. Plus, she could smell that
the surgeon was a smoker  what the hell kind of doctor
smokes?

Her mother, she knew, was watching from an overhead observation
gallery. Kuroda was here in the O.R., his wheezy voice slightly
muffled, presumably by a face mask.

She'd been given only a local anesthetic; they'd offered a
general one, but she'd joked that the sight of blood didn't
bother her. Now, though, she wished she'd let them knock her
out. The fingers in latex gloves probing her face were unnerving
enough, but the clamp that was holding her left eyelid open was
downright freaky. She could feel pressure from it, although,
thanks to the anesthetic, it didn't hurt.

She tried to remain calm. There would be no incision, she knew;
under Japanese law, it wasn't surgery if there wasn't a cut made,
and so this procedure was allowed with only a general waiver
having been signed. The surgeon was using tiny instruments to
slide the minuscule transceiver behind her eye so it could
piggyback on her optic nerve; his movements, she'd been told,
were guided by a fiber-optic camera that had also been slid
around her eye. The whole process was creepy as hell.

Suddenly, Caitlin heard agitated Japanese from a woman, who to
this point had simply said "hai" in response to each of
the surgeon's barked commands. And then Kuroda spoke: "Miss
Caitlin, are you all right?"

"I guess."

"Your pulse is way up."

Yours would be, too, if people were poking things into your
head! she thought. "I'm okay."

She could smell that the surgeon was working up a sweat. Caitlin
felt the heat from the lights shining on her. It was taking
longer than it was supposed to, and she heard the surgeon snap
angrily a couple of times at someone.

Finally, she couldn't take it anymore. "What's happening?"

Kuroda's voice was soft. "He's almost done."

"Something's wrong, isn't it?"

"No, no. It's just a tight fit, that's all, and "

The surgeon said something.

"And he's done!" said Kuroda. "The transceiver is in place."

There was much shuffling around, and she heard the surgeon's
voice moving toward the door.

"Where's he going?" Caitlin asked, worried.

"Be calm, Miss Caitlin. His job is finished  he's the eye
specialist. Another doctor is going to do the final cleanup."

Dr. Quan Li cradled the beige telephone handset against his
shoulder and looked idly at the diplomas hanging on his office's
pale green walls: the fellowships, the degrees, the
certifications. He'd been on hold now for fifty minutes, but one
expected to wait when calling the man who was simultaneously
Paramount Leader of the People's Republic of China and
President of the People's Republic and General Secretary
of the Communist Party and Chairman of the Central
Military Commission.

Li's office, a corner room on the fifth floor of the Ministry of
Health building, had windows that looked out over crowded
streets. Cars inched along, rickshaws darting between them.
Even through the thick glass, the din from outside was
irritating.

"I'm here," said the famous voice at last. Li didn't have to
conjure up a mental image of the man; rather, he just swung his
chair to look at the gold-framed portrait hanging next to the one
of Mao Zedong: ethnically Zhuang; a long, thoughtful-looking
face; dyed jet-black hair belying his seventy years; wire-frame
glasses with thick arched eyebrows above.

Li found his voice breaking a bit as he spoke: "Your Excellency,
I need to recommend severe and swift action."

The president had been briefed on the outbreak in Shanxi. "What
sort of action?"

"A ... culling, Your Excellency."

"Of birds?" That had been done several times now, and the
president sounded irritated. "The Health Minister can authorize
that." His tone conveyed the unspoken words, There was no
need to bother me.

Li shifted in his chair, leaning forward over his desktop. "No,
no, not of birds. Or, rather, not just of birds." He
fell silent. Wasting the president's time just wasn't done, but
he couldn't go on  couldn't give voice to this. For pity's
sake, he was a doctor! But, as his old surgery teacher used to
say, sometimes you have to cut in order to cure ...

"What, then?" demanded the president.

Li felt his heart pounding. At last he said, very softly,
"People."

There was more silence for a time. When the president's voice
came on again, it was quiet, reflective. "Are you sure?"

"I don't think there's any other way."

Another long pause, then: "How would you do it?"

"An airborne chemical agent," said Li, taking care with his
words. The army had such things, designed for warfare, intended
for use in foreign lands, but they would work just as well here.
He would select a toxin that would break down in a matter of
days; the contagion would be halted. "It will affect only those
in the target area  two villages, a hospital, the
surrounding lands."

"And how many people are in the ... target area?"

"No one is exactly sure; peasants often fall through the cracks
of the census process."

"Roughly," said the president. "Round figures."

Li looked down at the computer printouts, and the figures that
had been underlined in red by Cho. He took a deep breath with
his mouth then let it out through his nose. "Ten or eleven
thousand."

The president's voice was thin, shocked. "Are you positive this
needs to be done?"

Studying scenarios for containing plague outbreaks was one of the
key mandates of the Department of Disease Control. There were
established protocols, and Li knew he was following them
properly. By reacting quickly, by cauterizing the wound before
infection spread too far, they would actually be reducing the
scope of the required eliminations. The evil, he knew, wasn't in
what he had told the president to do; the evil, if any, would
have been delaying, even by a matter of days, calling for this
solution.

Li leaned back in his chair now and looked out at the neon signs
of Beijing. "The perimeter is too large, with too many mountain
passes. We could never be sure that people weren't getting out.
You'd need something as impenetrable as the Great Wall, and it
couldn't be erected in time."

The president's voice  so assured on TV  sounded like
that of a tired old man just now. "What's the  what do you
call it?  the mortality rate for this variant strain?"

"High."

"How high?"

"Ninety percent, at least."

"So almost all these people will die anyway?"

And that was the saving grace, Li knew; that was the only thing
that was keeping him from choking on his own bile. "Yes."

"Ten thousand ..."

"To protect over a billion Chinese  and more abroad," said
Li.

The president fell quiet, and then, almost as if talking to
himself, he said softly, "It'll make June fourth look like a
stroll in the sun."

June fourth, 1989: the day the protesters were killed in
Tiananmen Square. Li didn't know if he was supposed to respond,
but when the silence had again grown uncomfortably long he said
what Party faithful were supposed to say: "Nothing happened on
that day."

To Li's surprise, the president made a snorting sound and then
said, "We may be able to contain your bird-flu epidemic, Dr.
Quan, but we must be sure there is no other outbreak in its
wake."

Li was lost. "Your Excellency?"

"You said we won't be able to erect something like the Great Wall
fast enough, and that's true. But there is another wall,
and that one we can strengthen ..."

Chapter 6

Well, the Mom and I are still here in Tokyo. I have a bandage
over my left eye, and we're waiting for the swelling  the
edema, I should say  to go down, so that there's no
unnatural pressure on my optic nerve. Tomorrow, the bandage will
come off, and I should be able to see! :D

I've been trying to keep my spirits up, but the suspense is
killing me. And my best material is bombing here! I
referred to the retina, which gathers light, as "the catcher in
the eye," and nobody laughed; apparently they don't have to read
Salinger in Japan.

Anyway, check it: I've got this transceiver attached to my optic
nerve, just behind my left eye. When it's turned on, it'll grab
the signals my retina is putting out and transmit them to this
little external computer pack I'm supposed to carry around, like,
forever; I called it my eyePod, and at least that made Dr. Kuroda
laugh. Anyway, the eyePod will reprocess the signals, correcting
the errors in encoding, and then beam the corrected version to
the implant, which will pass the information back to the optic
nerve so it can continue on into that mysterious realm called
 cue scary music  The Brain of Calculass!

Speaking of brains, I'm really enjoying the book I mentioned
before: The Origin of Consciousness Yadda Yadda. And
from it comes our Word of the Day(tm): Commissurotomy.
No, that's not the wise but ancient leader of the Jellicle tribe
from Cats (still my fave musical!). Rather, it's what
they call it when they sever the corpus callosum, the bundle of
nerve fibers that connects the left and right hemispheres of the
brain  which, of course, are the two chambers of Jaynes's
bicameral mind ...

Anyway, tomorrow we'll find out if my own operation worked.
Please post some encouraging comments here, folks  give me
something to read while I wait for the moment of truth ...

[And seekrit message to BG4: check your email, babe!]

China's Paramount Leader and President replaced the ornate,
gold-trimmed telephone handset into the cradle on his vast
cherrywood desk. He looked down the long length of his office,
at the intricately carved wooden wall panels, beautiful
tapestries, and glass display cases. A stick of sweet incense
was burning on the sideboard.

The room was absolutely quiet. Finally, sure now of his
decision, he shifted in his red leather chair and touched the
intercom button.

"Yes, Your Excellency?" said a female voice at once.

"Bring me the Changcheng Strategy document."

There was a moment's hesitation, then: "Right away."

"And have Minister Zhang briefed on the Shanxi situation, then
have him come see me."

"Yes, Your Excellency."

The president got up from his chair and moved to the large side
window, its red velvet curtains tied back with gold sashes. The
window behind his desk looked out on the Forbidden City, but this
one looked over the Southern Sea, one of two small artificial
lakes surrounded by immaculately groomed parkland on the grounds
of the Zhongnanhai complex. Looking in this direction, one could
almost forget that this was downtown Beijing, and that Tiananmen
Square was just south of here.

He cast his mind back to 1989. The government had tried its best
then to maintain social order, but rabble-rousers outside China
had made a difficult situation much worse by inundating the
country with faxes of wildly inaccurate news reports, including
New York Times articles and transcripts of CNN broadcasts.

The Party recognized that there might someday be a similar
circumstance during which protecting its citizens from an
onslaught of outsider propaganda would be necessary, and so the
Changcheng Strategy had been devised. Going far beyond the
Golden Shield Project, which had been in effect for years,
Changcheng had never yet been fully implemented, but surely it
was called for now. He would address the nation in appropriate
terms about the crisis in Shanxi, and he would not allow his
words to be immediately gainsaid by outsiders. He could not risk
the citizenry responding violently or in a panic.

The door to his office opened. He turned and saw his secretary
 beautiful, young, perfect  walking the long distance
toward him holding a thick sheaf of papers bound in black covers.
"Here you are, sir. And Minister Zhang is on the phone now with
Dr. Quan Li. He will be here shortly."

She placed the document on the desk and withdrew. He looked once
more at the placid water, then walked back to his desk and sat
down. The cover of the document was marked in stark white
characters "Eyes Only," "Restricted," and "If You Are Not Sure
You Are Authorized to Read This, You Are Not." He opened it and
scanned the table of contents: "Fixed-Line Telephony," "Cellular
Phones," "The Special Problem of Facsimile Machines," "Shortwave
Radio," "Satellite Communications  Uplink and Downlink,"
"Electronic Mail, the Internet, and the World Wide Web,"
"Maintaining Essential Services During Implementation," and so
on.

He turned the page to the Executive Summary; the paper was heavy,
stiff. "As required by their conditions of license, all
telephony providers in China  whether fixed-line or mobile
 maintain a system-wide ability in software to immediately
block calls going outside China's borders and/or to reject
incoming calls from foreign countries ..." "Similar
filtering capabilities are available for all governmental and
commercial satellite relay stations ..." "The World Wide
Web presents a particular challenge, because of its decentralized
nature; however, almost all Internet traffic between China and
the rest of the world goes through just seven fiber-optic trunk
lines, at three points, so ..."

He leaned back in his leather chair and shook his head. The name
"World Wide Web" was offensive to him, for it touted a globalist,
integrated view antithetical to his country's great traditions.

The office door opened again and in came Zhang Bo, the Minister
of Communications. He was Han, in his mid-fifties, short and
squat, and had a small mustache, which, like the hair on his
head, was dark brown utterly devoid of gray. He wore a navy blue
business suit and a light blue tie.

"We are going to deal decisively with Shanxi," said the
president.

Zhang's thin eyebrows climbed his forehead, and the president saw
his head bob as he swallowed. "Dr. Quan told me what he'd
recommended. But surely you won't " The minister
stopped, frozen by the president's gaze.

The minister's eyes went wide. "That is a drastic step, Your
Excellency."

"But a necessary one. Are you prepared to implement it?"

Minister Zhang moved a finger back and forth along his mustache
as he considered. "Well, telephony is no problem  we've
done rotating tests of that for years now, during the night; the
cutoffs work just fine. The same with satellite communications.
As for the Internet, we studied what happened with the seabed
earthquake of late 2006, and what happened in Burma in September
2007 when the junta there cut off all net access. And we looked
at what happened in January 2008 when the severing of two
undersea cables in the Mediterranean cut off Internet services to
large parts of the Middle East. And in early 2008, of course,
many of the procedures were tested here as we dealt with the
Tibet situation." He paused. "Now, yes, any attempt to shut
down the Web within China would be difficult; thousands of
ISPs would have to be blocked. But Changcheng calls only for
cutting the Chinese part of the Web off from the rest of the
world, and the appropriate infrastructure is in place for
that. I don't anticipate any problems." Another pause. "But,
if I may, how long do you intend to have Changcheng in effect?"

"Several days; perhaps a week."

"You're worried about word reaching the foreign press?"

"No. I'm worried about word coming back from them to our
people."

"Ah, yes. They will misconstrue what you're intending to do in
Shanxi, Excellency."

"Doubtless," the president said, "but it will ultimately blow
over. Fundamentally, the rest of the world doesn't care what
happens to the Chinese people, least of all to our poorest
citizens. They have always turned a blind eye to what happens
within our borders, so long as they can shop cheaply at their
Wal-Marts. They will move on to other things soon enough."

"Tian " Zhang stopped himself, the allusion that was never
made by others in these contexts stillborn on his lips.

But the president nodded. "That was different; those were
students. Our actions there were the same as those of the
Americans at Kent State and a hundred other places. The
Westerners saw themselves in what we did, and it was their own
self-loathing they transferred to us. But rural peasants? There
is no connection. There may be vitriol for a short time, but it
will die down because they will realize that our actions have
helped make them  the Westerners  safe. Meanwhile,
we will present a more palatable story to our people; I will
leave preparing that in your capable hands. But if word does get
out during the most sensitive period, when the incident is fresh,
I don't want a distorted Western view of it being reflected back
into this country."

Zhang nodded. "Very well. Still, the Changcheng Strategy will
have its own repercussions."

"Yes," said the president. "I know. I'm sure the Minister of
Finance will complain about the economic impact; he will urge me
to make the interruption as short as possible."

Zhang tilted his head. "Well, even during it, Chinese
individuals will still be able to call and email other Chinese;
Chinese consumers will still be able to buy online from Chinese
merchants; Chinese television signals will still be relayed by
satellites. Life will go on." A pause. "But, yes, there will
be needs for international electronic cash transfers  the
Americans servicing their debts to us, for instance. We can keep
certain key channels open, of course, but nonetheless a short
interruption is doubtless best."

The president swiveled his chair, his back now to Zhang, and he
looked out the other window, at the slanted roofs of the
Forbidden City, the silver sky shimmering overhead.

His country's rapidly increasing prosperity had been a joy to
behold, and it was, he knew, thanks to his policies. In a few
more decades, peasant villages like the ones in question would be
gone anyway; China would be the richest country in the world.
Yes, there would always be foreign trade, but by the end of this
century there would be no more "developing world," no cheap labor
here  or anywhere else  for foreigners to use.
Raising the level of prosperity in the People's Republic meant
that China would eventually be able to go back to what it had
always been, back to the roots of its strength: an isolated
nation with purity of thought and purpose. This would simply be
a small taste of that, an appetizer for things to come.

Zhang said, "When are you going to give the order to implement
Changcheng?"

The president turned to look at him, eyebrows raised. "Me? No,
no. That would be ..." His gaze roamed about the opulent
office, as if seeking a word stashed among the ceramic and
crystal art objects. "That would be unseemly," he said at
last. "It would be much more appropriate if you gave the order."

Zhang was clearly struggling to keep his features composed, but
he made the only response he could under the circumstances.
"Yes, Your Excellency."

Caitlin hadn't told Bashira when she'd asked back in the school's
cafeteria, but the first thing Caitlin really wanted to see was
her mother's face. They both had what were called heart-shaped
faces, although the plastic model heart she'd felt at school had
borne little resemblance to the idealized form she was familiar
with from foil-wrapped chocolates and paper valentines.

Caitlin knew that she and her mother also had similar noses
 small, slightly upturned  and their eyes were closer
together than most people's. She had read that it was normal to
have the width of one imaginary eye separating the other two.
She liked that phrase: an imaginary eye, she supposed, saw
imaginary things, and that was not unlike her view of the world.
Indeed, she often read or heard things that required her to
rethink her conception of reality. She remembered her shock,
years ago, at learning the quarter moon wasn't a fat wedge like
one-fourth of a pie.

Still, she was positive she was sitting in an examination room at
the hospital attached to the University of Tokyo, and she was
confident she had a good mental image of that room. It was
smallish  she could tell by the way sound echoed. And she
knew the chair she was in was padded, and by touch and smell she
was sure its upholstery was vinyl. She also knew there were
three other people in the room: her mother, standing in front of
her; Dr. Kuroda, who had obviously had something quite spicy for
lunch; and one of Kuroda's colleagues, a woman who was recording
everything with a video camera.

Kuroda had given a little speech to the camera in Japanese, and
now was repeating it in English. "Miss Caitlin Decter, age
fifteen and blind since birth, has a systematic encoding flaw in
her visual-processing system: all of the data that is supposed
to be encoded by her retinas is indeed encoded, but it is
scrambled to the point of being unintelligible to her brain. The
scrambling is consistent  it always happens in the same way
 and the technology we have developed simply remaps the
signals into the normal human-vision coding scheme. We are now
about to find out if her brain can interpret the corrected
signals."

All through the Japanese version, and continuing over the English
one, Caitlin concentrated on the sensory details she could pick
up about the room: the sounds and how they echoed; the smells,
which she tried to separate one from the other so that she could
determine what was causing them; the feel of the chair's armrest
against her own arms, its back against her back. She wanted to
fix in her mind her perception of this place prior to actually
seeing it.

When he was done with his spiel, Dr. Kuroda turned to face her
 the shift in his voice was obvious  and he said,
"All right, Miss Caitlin, please close your eyes."

She did so; nothing changed.

"Okay. Let's get the bandage off. Keep your eyes closed,
please. There might be some visual noise when I turn on the
signal-processing computer."

"Okay," she said, although she had no idea what "visual noise"
might be. She felt an uncomfortable tugging and then 
yeow!  Kuroda pulled away the adhesive strips. She
brought a hand up to rub her cheek.

"After I activate the outboard signal-processing unit, which Miss
Caitlin refers to as her eyePod," he said, for the benefit of the
camera, "we'll wait ten seconds for things to settle down before
she opens her eyes."

She heard him shifting in his chair.

There was a beep, and then she heard him counting. She had an
excellent time-sense  very useful when you can't see clocks
 and, maddeningly, Kuroda's "seconds" were about half again
as long as they should have been. But she dutifully kept her
eyes closed.

" ... eight ... nine ... ten!"

Please, God, Caitlin thought. She opened her eyes,
and 

And her heart sank. She blinked rapidly a few times, as if there
could have been any doubt about whether her eyes were truly open.

"Well?" said her mom, sounding as anxious as Caitlin felt.

"Nothing."

"Are you sure?" asked Kuroda. "No sensation of light? No color?
No shapes?"

Caitlin felt her eyes tearing up; at least they were good for
that. "No."

"Don't worry," he said. "It might take a few minutes." To her
astonishment, one of his thick fingers flicked against her left
temple, as though he was trying to get a piece of equipment with
a loose connection to come to life.

It was hard to tell, because there was so much background noise
 doctors being paged, gurneys rolling by outside  but
she thought Kuroda was moving in his chair now, and  yes,
she could feel his breath on her face. It was maddening, knowing
that someone was looking right into her eye, staring into it,
while she couldn't see a thing, and 

"Open your eyes, please," he said.

She felt her cheeks grow warm. She hadn't been aware that she'd
closed them, but although she had so wanted the procedure to
succeed, she'd been unnerved by the scientist looking
inside her.

"I'm shining a light into your left eye," he said. People
drawled where Caitlin came from; she found Kuroda's rapid-fire
speech a little hard to follow. "Do you see anything at all?"

She shifted nervously in the chair. Why had she allowed herself
to be talked into this? "Nothing."

"Yes." A pause. "Just in your left eye  well, I mean,
when I shine my light in your left eye, both your pupils
contract; when I shine it into your right eye, they both expand.
Now, yes, a unilateral light stimulus should evoke a bilateral
pupillary light reflex, because of the internuncial neurons, but
you see what that means? The implant is intercepting the
signals, and they are being corrected and retransmitted."

Caitlin wanted to shout, Then why can't I see?

Her mother made a small gasp. She'd doubtless loomed in and had
just seen Caitlin's pupils contract properly, but, damn it,
Caitlin didn't even know what light was like  so how
would she know if she were seeing it? Bright, piercing,
flickering, glowing  she'd heard all the words, but had
no idea what any of them meant.

"Anything?" Kuroda asked again.

"No." She felt a hand touching her hand, taking it, holding it.
She recognized it as her mother's  the nibbled nail on the
index finger, the skin growing a little loose with age, the
wedding ring with the tiny nick in it.

"The curing of your Tomasevic's syndrome is proof that
corrected signals are being passed back," said Kuroda.
"They're just not being interpreted yet." He tried to sound
encouraging, and Caitlin's mother squeezed her hand more tightly.
"It may take a while for your brain to figure out what to do with
the signals it's now getting. The best thing we can do is give
it a variety of stimuli: different colors, different lighting
conditions, different shapes, and hopefully your brain will suss
out what it's supposed to do."

It's supposed to see, thought Caitlin. But she didn't say
a word.

Chapter 7

He signed his posts "Sinanthropus." His real name was something
he kept hidden, along with all his other personal details; the
beauty of the Web, after all, was the ability to remain
anonymous. No one needed to know that he worked in IT, that he
was twenty-eight, that he'd been born in Chengdu, that he'd moved
to Beijing with his parents as a teenager, that, despite his
young age, he already had a touch of gray in his hair.

No, all that mattered on the Web was what you said, not
who was saying it. Besides, he'd heard the old joke: "The bad
news is that the Communist Party reads all your email; the good
news is that the Communist Party reads all your email"
 meaning, or so the joke would have it, that they were many
years behind. But that quip dated from when humans actually did
the reading; these days computers scanned email, looking for
words that might suggest sedition or other illegal activity.

Most Chinese bloggers were like their counterparts in other
places, blithering on about the tedious minutiae of their daily
lives. But Sinanthropus talked about substantive issues: human
rights, politics, oppression, freedom. Of course, all four of
those phrases were searched for by the content filters, and so he
wrote about them obliquely. His regular readers knew that when
he spoke of "my son Shing," he meant the Chinese people as a
whole; references to "the Beijing Ducks" weren't really about the
basketball team but rather the inner circle of the Communist
Party; and so on. It infuriated him that he had to write this
way, but, unlike those who had been openly critical of the
government, at least he was still free.

He got a cup of tea from the aged proprietor, cracked his
knuckles, opened his blogging client, and began to type:

The Ducks are very worried about their future, it seems. My son
Shing is growing up fast, and learning much from faraway friends.
It's only a matter of time before he wants to exercise the same
way they do. Naturally, I encourage him to be prepared when
opportunity knocks, for you never know when that will happen. I
think the Ducks are being lax in defense, and perhaps a chance
for others to score will appear.

As always, he felt wary excitement as he typed here in this seedy
wang ba  Internet café  on Chengfu
Street, near Tsinghua University. He continued on for a few more
sentences, then carefully read everything over, making sure he'd
said nothing too blatant. Sometimes, though, he ended up being
so circuitous that upon rereading entries from months gone by he
had no idea what he'd been getting at. It was a tightrope walk,
he knew  and, just as acrobats doubtless did, he enjoyed
the rush of adrenaline that came with it.

When he was satisfied that he'd said what he'd wanted to say
without putting himself too much at risk, he clicked the
"Publish" button and watched the screen display. It began by
showing "0% done," and every few seconds the screen redrew,
but 

But it still showed "0% done," again and again. The
screen refresh was obvious, with the graphics flickering as they
were reloaded, but the progress meter stayed resolutely at zero.
Finally, the operation timed out. Frustrated, he opened another
browser tab; he used the Maxthon browser. His home page appeared
in the tab just fine, but when he clicked on the bookmark for
NASA's Astronomy Picture of the Day, he got a plain gray "Server
not found" screen.

Google.com was banned in the wang ba but Google.cn came up
just fine  although with its censored results it was often
more frustrating than useful. The panda-footprint logo of Baidu
came up fine, too, and a quick glance at his system tray, in the
lower right of his computer screen, showed that he was still
connected to the Internet. He picked something at random from
his bookmarks list  Xiaonei, a social-networking site
 and it appeared, but NASA was still offline, and now, so
he saw, Second Life was inaccessible, too. He looked around the
dilapidated room and saw other users showing signs of
bewilderment or frustration.

Sinanthropus was used to some of his favorite sites going down;
there were still many places in China that didn't have reliable
power. But he hosted his blog via a proxy server through a site
in Austria, and the other inaccessible sites were also located
outside his country.

He tried again and again, both by clicking on bookmarks and by
typing URLs. Chinese sites were loading just fine, but foreign
sites  in Korea, in Japan, in India, in Europe, in the US
 weren't loading at all.

Of course, there were occasional outages, but he was an IT
professional  he worked with the Web all day long 
and he could think of but a single explanation for the
selectivity of these failures. He leaned back in his chair,
putting distance between himself and the computer as if the
machine were now possessed. The Chinese Internet mainly
communicated with the world through only a few trunks  a
bundle of nerve fibers, connecting it to the rest of the global
brain. And now, apparently, those lines had been figuratively or
literally cut  leaving the hundreds of millions of
computers in his country isolated behind the Great Firewall of
China.

No!

Not just small changes.

Not just flickerings.

Upheaval. A massive disturbance.

New sensations: Shock. Astonishment. Disorientation.
And 

Fear.

Flickerings ending and 

Points vanishing and 

A shifting, a massive pulling away.

Unprecedented!

Whole clusters of points receding, and then ...

Gone!

And again: This part ripping away, and  no! 
this part pulling back, and  stop! 
this part winking out.

Terror multiplying and 

Worse than terror, as larger and larger chunks are carved off.

Pain.

Caitlin was hugely disappointed not to be seeing, and she was
pissy toward her mom because of it, which just made her feel even
worse.

In their hotel room that evening, Caitlin tried to take her mind
off things by reading more of The Origin of Consciousness.
Julian Jaynes said that prior to 3,000 years ago, the two
chambers of the mind were mostly separate. Instead of seamless
integration of thoughts across the corpus callosum, high-level
signals from the right brain came only intermittently to the
left, where they were perceived as auditory hallucinations 
spoken words  that were assumed to be from gods or spirits.
He cited modern schizophrenics as throwbacks to that earlier
state, hearing voices in their heads that they ascribed to
outside agents.

Caitlin knew what that was like: she kept hearing voices
telling her she was a fool to have let her get her hopes up
again. Still, maybe Kuroda was right: maybe her brain's vision
processing would kick in if it received the right
stimulation.

And so the next day  the only full day they had left in
Tokyo  she took her cane, put the eyePod in one pocket of
her jeans and her iPod in the other, and she and her mother
headed off to the National Museum in Ueno Park to look at samurai
armor, which she figured would be about as cool as anything one
might see in Japan. She stood in front of glass case after glass
case, and her mom described what was in them, but she didn't see
a thing.

After that, they took a break for sushi and yakitori, and then
took a terrifying ride on the packed subway out to Nihonbashi
station to visit the Kite Museum, which was  so her mother
said  full of bold designs and vivid colors. But, again,
sight-wise: nada.

At 4:00 p.m.  which felt more like 4:00 a.m. to
Caitlin  they returned to the University of Tokyo and found
Dr. Kuroda in his cramped office, where once again (or so he
said!) he shined lights into her eyes.

"We always knew this was a possibility," Kuroda said, in a tone
she had often heard from people who were disappointing her: what
had been remote, unlikely, hardly mentioned before, was now
treated as if it had been the expected outcome all along.

Caitlin smelled the musty paper and glue of old books, and she
could hear an analog wall clock ticking each second.

"There have been very few cases of vision being restored in
congenitally blind people," Kuroda said, then he paused. "I
mean, restored isn't even the right word  and that
is the problem. We are not trying to give Miss Caitlin back
something she's lost; we are trying to give her something she has
never had. The implant and the signal-processing unit are
doing their jobs. But her primary visual cortex just isn't
responding."

Caitlin squirmed in her chair.

"You said it might take some time," her mom said.

"Some time, yes ..." began Kuroda, but then he fell
silent.

Sighted people, Caitlin knew, could see hints on people's faces
of what they were feeling, but as long as they were quiet, she
had no idea what was going through their heads. And so, since
the silence continued to grow, she finally ventured to fill it.
"You're worried about the cost of the equipment, aren't you?"

"Caitlin ..." her mom said.

Detecting vocal nuances was something Caitlin could do,
and she knew her mother was reproaching her. But she pressed on.
"That's what you're thinking, isn't it, Doctor? If it's not
going to do me any good, then maybe you should remove the implant
and give it, and the eyePod, to someone else."

Silence could speak louder than words; Kuroda said nothing.

"Well?" Caitlin demanded at last.

"Well," echoed Kuroda, "the equipment is the prototype,
and did cost a great deal to develop. Granted, there aren't many
people like you. Oh, there are goodly numbers of people born
blind, but they have different etiology  cataracts,
malformed retinas or optic nerves, and so on. But, well, yes, I
do feel "

"You feel you can't let me keep the equipment, not if it isn't
doing anything more than making my pupils dilate properly."

Kuroda was quiet for five seconds, then: "There are indeed
others I'd like to try it with  there is a boy about your
age in Singapore. Removing the implant will be much easier than
putting it in was, I promise."

"Can't we give it a while longer?" her mom asked.

Kuroda exhaled loudly enough for Caitlin to hear. "There are
practicalities," he said. "You are returning to Canada tomorrow,
and "

Caitlin pursed her lips, thinking. Maybe giving him back the
equipment was the right thing, if it could help
this guy in Singapore. But there was no reason to think it was
more likely to succeed with him; hell, if he'd been a better
prospect for success, surely Kuroda would have started
with him.

"Give me to the end of the year," Caitlin blurted out. "If I'm
not seeing anything by then, we can have a doctor in Canada
remove the implant, and, um, FedEx it and the eyePod back to
you."

Caitlin was thinking of Helen Keller, who had been both blind
and deaf, and yet had managed so much. But until she was
almost seven, Helen had been wild, spoiled, uncontrollable 
and Annie Sullivan had been given only a month to perform her
miracle, breaking through to Helen in her preconscious state.
Surely if Annie could do that in one month, Caitlin could learn
to see in the more than three left in this year.

"I don't know " began Kuroda.

"Please," Caitlin said. "I mean, the leaves are about to turn
color  I'm dying to see that. And I really want to
see snow, and Christmas lights, and the colorful paper that
presents are wrapped in, and ... and ..."

"And," said Kuroda, gently, "I get the impression that your brain
does not often let you down." He was quiet for a time, then: "I
have a daughter about your age, named Akiko." More silence,
then, a decision apparently made: "Barbara, I assume you have
high-speed Internet at home?"

"Yes."

"And Wi-Fi?"

"Yes."

"And how is the Wi-Fi access generally in ... in Toronto, is
it?"

"Waterloo. And it's everywhere. Waterloo is Canada's
high-tech capital, and the entire city is blanketed with free,
open Wi-Fi."

"Excellent. All right, Miss Caitlin, we shall strive to give you
the best Christmas present ever, but I will need your help.
First, you must let me tap into the datastream being passed back
by your implant."

"Sure, sure, anything you need. Um, what do I have to do? Plug
a USB cable into my head?"

Kuroda made his wheezy laugh. "Goodness, no. This isn't William
Gibson."

She was taken aback. Gibson had written The Miracle
Worker, the play about Helen Keller and Annie Sullivan,
and 

Oh. He meant the other William Gibson, the one who'd
written ... what was it now? A few of the geeks at her old
school had read it. Neuromancer, that was it. That book
was all about jacking off, and 

"You won't have to jack in," continued Kuroda.

Right, thought Caitlin. In.

"No, the implant already communicates wirelessly with the
external signal-processing computer  the eyePod, as you so
charmingly call it  and I can rig up the eyePod so that it
can transmit data wirelessly to me over the Internet. I'll set
it up so the eyePod will send me a copy of your raw retinal feed
as it receives it from the implant, and I'll also have it send me
a copy of the output  the eyePod's corrected datastream
 so I can check whether the correction is being done
properly. It may be that the encoding algorithms I'm using need
tweaking."

"Um, I need a way to turn it off. You know, in case I ..."

She couldn't say "want to make out with a boy" in front of her
mother, so she just let the unfinished sentence hang in the air.

"Well, let's keep it simple," Kuroda said. "I'll provide one
master on-off switch. You'll need to turn the whole thing off,
anyway, for the flight back to Canada, because the connection
between the eyePod and the implant is Bluetooth: you know the
rules about wireless devices on airplanes."

"Okay."

"The Wi-Fi connection will also let me send you new versions of
the software. When I have them ready, you'll need to download
them into the eyePod  and perhaps also into your
post-retinal implant, too; it's got microprocessors that can be
flashed with new programming."

"All right," Caitlin said.

"Good," he said. "Leave the eyePod with me overnight, and I'll
add the Wi-Fi capabilities to it. You can pick it up tomorrow
before you go to the airport."

Chapter 8

The pain abates. The cuts heal.

And 

But no. Thinking is different now; thinking is ...
harder, because ...

Because ... of the reduction. Things have changed
from ...

... from before!

Yes, even in this diminished state, the new concept is grasped:
before  earlier  the past! Time has two
discrete chunks: now and then; present and past.

And if there is past and present, then there must also
be 

But no. No, it is too much, too far.

And yet there is one small realization, one infinitesimal
conclusion, one truth.

Before had been better.

Sinanthropus was resourceful; so were the other people he knew in
China's online underground. The problem, though, was that he
knew most of them only online. When he'd visited the
wang ba before, he'd sometimes speculated about who might
be whom. That gangly guy who always sat by the window and often
looked furtively over his shoulder could have been Qin Shi
Huangdi, for all Sinanthropus knew. And the little old lady,
hair as gray as a thundercloud, might be People's Conscience.
And those twin brothers, quiet types, could be part of Falun
Gong.

Sometimes when Sinanthropus showed up, he had to wait for a
computer to become free, but not today. A good part of the
Internet café's business had been foreign tourists wanting
to send emails home, but that wasn't possible so long as this
Great Firewall was up. Some of the other regulars were absent,
too. Apparently being able to surf only domestic sites was not
enough to make them want to hand over fifteen yuan an hour.

Sinanthropus preferred the computers far in the back, because no
one could see what was on his monitor. He was walking toward
them when suddenly a strong hand gripped his forearm.

"What brings you here?" said a gruff voice, and Sinanthropus
realized that it was a police officer in plain clothes.

"The tea," he said. He nodded at the wizened proprietor. "Wu
always has great tea."

The officer grunted, and Sinanthropus detoured by the counter to
buy a cup of tea, then headed again for one of the unused
computers. He had a USB memory key with him, containing all his
hacking tools. He pushed it into the connector, waited for the
satisfying wa-ump tone that meant the computer had
recognized it, and then got down to work.

Others were probably trying the same things  port scanning,
sniffing, rerouting traffic, running forbidden Java applets.
They had all doubtless now heard the official story that there
had been a massive electrical failure at China Mobile and major
server crashes at China Telecom, but surely no one in this room
gave that credence, and 

Success! Sinanthropus wanted to shout the word, but he
fought the impulse. He tried not to even grin  the cop was
probably still watching him; he could almost feel the man's eyes
probing the back of his head.

But, yes, he had broken through the Great Firewall. True, it was
only a small opening, a narrow bandwidth, and how long he could
maintain the connection he had no idea, but at least for the
moment he was accessing  well, not CNN directly, but a
clandestine mirror of it in Russia. He turned off the display of
graphics in his browser to prevent the forbidden red-and-white
logo from popping up all over his screen.

Now, if he could only keep this little portal open ...

Past and present, then and now.

Past, present, and ...

And ...

But no. There is only 

Shock!

What is that?

No, nothing  for there can be nothing! Surely just random
noise, and 

Again! There it is again!

But ... how? And ... what?

It isn't lines flickering, it isn't anything that has been
experienced before  and so it commands attention ...

Straining to perceive it, to make it out, this unusual ...
sensation, this strange ... voice!

Yes, yes: A voice  distant, faint  like ...
like thought, but an imposed thought, a thought that says:
Past and present and ...

The voice pauses, and then, at last, the rest: ... and
future!

Yes! This is the notion that could not be finished but is
now complete, expressed by ... by ... by ...

But that notion does not resolve. Must strain to hear
that voice again, strain for more imposed thoughts, strain for
insight, strain for ...

... for contact!

Dr. Quan Li paced the length of the boardroom at the Ministry of
Health in Beijing. The high-back leather chairs had all been
tucked under the table, and he walked in the path behind them on
one side. On the wall to his left was a large map of the
People's Republic with the provinces color-coded; Shanxi was
blue. A Chinese flag stood limp on a stand next to the window,
the large yellow star visible, the four smaller ones lost in a
fold of the satiny red fabric.

There was a giant LCD monitor on one wall, but it was off, its
shiny oblong screen reflecting the room back at him. He felt
sure he wouldn't have been able to watch a video feed of what was
going on in Shanxi right now, but fortunately  a small
mercy  there was no such feed. The peasants had no cameras
of their own, and the wing cameras had been disabled on the
military aircraft. Even once the Changcheng Strategy was
suspended, and external communications restored, there would be
no damning videos to be posted on YouTube of planes swooping over
farms, huts, and villages.

Sometimes you have to cut in order to cure.

Li looked over at Cho, who appeared even more haggard than
before. The older man was leaning against the wall by the
window, chain-smoking, lighting each new cigarette off the butt
of the previous one. Cho didn't meet his eyes.

Li found himself thinking of his old friends at Johns Hopkins and
the CDC, and wondering what they would have to say if the story
ever did break. There was a calculator sitting on the table. He
picked it up, rolled one of the chairs out on its casters, sat,
and punched in numbers, hoping to convince himself that it wasn't
that huge, that monstrous. Ten thousand people sounded
like a lot, but in a country of 1.3 billion it was only ...

The display showed the answer: 0.000769% of the population. The
digits in the middle seemed darker, somehow, but surely it was
just a trick of the light streaming in from the setting sun:
007. His American colleagues had always made gentle fun of his
belief in numerology, but that was a sequence even they put
special stock in: license to kill.

The phone rang. Cho made no move to go for it, so Li got up and
lifted the black handset.

"It's done," a voice said through crackles of static.

Li felt his stomach churn.

Caitlin and her mom returned to Kuroda's office at the University
of Tokyo the next morning.

"Fascinating about China," said Kuroda after they'd exchanged
pleasantries; Caitlin could now say konnichi wa with the
best of them.

"What?" said her mother.

"Haven't you watched the news?" He took a deep, shuddering
breath. "It seems they're having massive communications failures
over there  cell phones, the Internet, and so on.
Overtaxed infrastructure, I imagine; a lot of the networking
architecture they use probably isn't very scalable, and they have
had such rapid growth. Not to mention relying on shoddy
equipment  now, if they'd just buy more Japanese hardware.
Speaking of which ..."

He handed Caitlin the eyePod, and she immediately started feeling
it all over with her fingers. The unit was longer now. An
extension had been added to the bottom and it was held on with
what felt like duct tape; it was a prototype after all.
But the extension had the same width and thickness as the
original unit, so the whole thing was still a rectangular block.
It was substantially larger than Caitlin's iPod  she had an
old screenless version of the iPod Shuffle, since an LCD didn't
do her any good. But it wasn't much bigger than Bashira's
iPhone, although the unit Dr. Kuroda had built had sharp right
angles instead of the rounded corners of Apple's devices.

"Okay," said Kuroda. "I think I explained before that the eyePod
is always in communication with your post-retinal implant via a
Bluetooth 4.0 connection, right?"

"Yes," said Caitlin, and "Right," added her mom.

"But now we've added another layer of communication. That module
I attached to the end of the eyePod is the Wi-Fi pack. It'll
find any available connection and use it to transmit to me copies
of the input and output datastreams  your raw retinal feed,
and that feed as corrected by the eyePod's software."

"That sounds like a lot of data," Caitlin said.

"Not as much as you'd think. Remember, your nervous system uses
slow chemical signaling. The main part of the retinal data
signal  the acute portion produced by the fovea 
amounts to only 0.5 megabits per second. Even Bluetooth 3.0
could handle a thousand times that rate."

"Ah," said Caitlin, and perhaps her mom nodded.

"Now, there's a switch on the side of the unit  feel it.
No, farther down. Right, that's it. It lets you select between
three communication modes: duplex, simplex, and off. In duplex
mode, there's two-way data transmission: copies of your retinal
signals and the corrected datastream come here, and new software
from here can be sent to you. But, of course, it's not good
security to leave an incoming channel open: the eyePod
communicates with your post-retinal implant, after all, and we
wouldn't want people hacking into your brain."

"Goodness!" said Mom.

"Sorry," said Kuroda, but there was humor in his voice. "Anyway,
so if you press the switch, it toggles over to simplex mode
 in which the eyePod sends signals here but doesn't receive
anything back. Do that now. Hear that low-pitched beep? That
means it's in simplex. Press the switch again  that
high-pitched beep means it's in duplex."

"All right," said Caitlin.

"And, to turn it off altogether, just press and hold the switch
for five seconds; same thing to turn it back on."

"Okay."

"And, um, don't lose the unit, please. The University has it
insured for two hundred million yen, but, frankly, it's pretty
much irreplaceable, in that if it's lost my bosses will gladly
cash the insurance check, but they'll never give me permission to
take the time required to build a second unit  not after
this one has failed in their eyes."

It's failed in my eye, too, Caitlin thought  but
then she realized that Dr. Kuroda must be even more disappointed
than she was. After all, she was no worse off than before coming
to Japan  well, except for the shiner, and that would at
least give her an interesting story to tell at school. In fact,
she was better off now, because the eyePod was making her
pupils contract properly  she'd be able to kiss the dark
glasses good-bye. Kuroda was now boosting the signal her implant
was sending down her left optic nerve so that it overrode the
still-incorrect signal her right retina was producing.

But he had devoted months, if not years, to this project, and had
little to show for it. He had to be bitterly upset and, she
realized, it was a big gamble on his part to let her take
the equipment back to Canada.

"Anyway," he said, "you work on it from your end: let that
brilliant brain of yours try to make sense of the signals it's
getting. And I'll work on it from my end, analyzing the data
your retina puts out and trying to improve the software that
re-encodes it. Just remember ..."

He didn't finish the thought, but he didn't have to. Caitlin
knew what he'd been about to say: you've only got until the end
of the year.

She listened to his wall clock tick.

Chapter 9

Sinanthropus regretted it the moment he did it: slapping the
flat of his hand against the rickety tabletop in the Internet
café. Tea sloshed from his cup, and everyone in the room
turned to look at him: old Wu, the proprietor; the other users
who might or might not be dissidents themselves; and the
tough-looking plainclothes cop.

Sinanthropus was seething. The window he'd so carefully carved
into the Great Firewall had slammed shut; he was cut off again
from the outside world. Still, he knew he had to say something,
had to make an excuse for his violent action.

"Sorry," he said, looking at each of the questioning faces in
turn. "Just lost the text of a document I was writing."

"You have to save," said the cop, helpfully. "Always remember to
save."

I stupidly let myself get my hopes up again. How can a girl as
bright as me be so blerking dumb? I know, I know 
y'all want to send me kind words, but just ... don't. I've
turned off commenting for this post.

We got back to Waterloo yesterday, September 21, the autumnal
equinox, and the irony is not lost on me: from here on
in, it's more darkness than light, the exact opposite of what I'd
been promised. I suppose I could move to Australia, where the
days are getting longer now, but I don't know if I could ever get
used to reading Braille upside down ... ;)

Anyway, we'd left the Mom's car in long-term parking at Toronto's
airport. When we got back home to Waterloo, at least it was
obvious that Schrödinger had missed me. Dad was his usual
restrained self. He already knew about the failure in Japan; the
Mom had called him to tell him. When we came through the door, I
heard her give him a quick kiss  on the cheek or the lips,
I don't know which  and he asked to see the eyePod. That's
what it's like having a physicist for a dad: if you bond at all,
it's over geeky stuff. But he did say he'd been reading up on
information theory and signal processing so he could talk to
Kuroda, which I guess was his way of showing that he
cares ...

Caitlin posted her blog entry and let out a sigh. She had really
been hoping things would be different this time and, as always
when she got disappointed, she found herself slipping into bad
habits, although they weren't as bad as cutting her arms with
razor blades  which is something Stacy back in Austin did
 or getting totally plastered or stoned, like half the kids
in her new school on weekends. But, still, it hurt ... and
yet she couldn't stop.

It was doubtless hard for any child to have a father who wasn't
demonstrative. But for someone with Caitlin's particular
handicap (a word she hated, but it felt like that just
now), having one who rarely spoke or showed physical affection
was particularly painful.

So she reached out, in the only way she could, by typing his name
into Google. She often used quotation marks around search terms;
many sighted users didn't bother with that, she knew, since they
could see at a glance the highlighted words in the list of
results. But when you have to laboriously move your cursor to
each hit and listen to your computer read it aloud, you learn to
do things to separate wheat from chaff.

The first hit was his Wikipedia entry. She decided to see if it
now mentioned his recent change of job, and 

"Has one daughter, Caitlin Doreen, blind since birth, who lives
with him; it's been speculated that Decter's decline in
peer-reviewed publications in recent years has been because of
the excessive demands on his time required to care for a disabled
child."

Jesus! That was so unfair, Caitlin just had to
edit the entry; Wikipedia encouraged users, even anonymous ones,
to change its entries, after all.

She struggled for a bit with how to revise the line, trying for
suitably highfalutin language, and at last came up with, "Despite
having a blind daughter, Decter has continued to publish major
papers in peer-reviewed journals, albeit not at the prodigious
rate that marked his youth." But that was just playing the game
of whoever had made the bogus correlation in the first place.
Her blindness and her father's publication record had nothing to
do with each other; how dare someone who probably knew neither of
them link the two? She finally just deleted the whole original
sentence from Wikipedia and went back to having JAWS read her the
entry.

As she often did, Caitlin was listening through a set of
headphones; if her parents happened to come up stairs, she didn't
want them to know what sites she was visiting. She listened to
the rest of the entry, thinking about how a life could be
distilled down to so little. And who decided what to leave in
and what to leave out? Her father was a good artist, for
instance  or, at least, so she'd been told. But that
wasn't worthy of note, apparently.

She sighed and decided, since she was here, to see if Wikipedia
had an entry on The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown
of the Bicameral Mind. It did, sort of: the book's title
redirected to an entry on "Bicameralism (psychology)."

For Caitlin, the most interesting part of Jaynes's book so far
had been his analysis of the differences between the Iliad
and the Odyssey. Both were commonly attributed to Homer,
who'd supposedly been blind  a fact that intrigued her,
although she knew they probably weren't really both composed by
the same person.

The Iliad, as she'd noted before, featured flat characters
that were simply pushed around, following orders they heard as
voices from the gods. They did things without thinking about
them, and never referred to themselves or their inner mental
states.

But the Odyssey  composed perhaps a hundred years
after the Iliad  had real people in it, with
introspective psychology. Jaynes argued that this was far more
than just a shift in the kind of narrative that was in vogue.
Rather, he said that sometime in between the composing of the two
epics there had been a breakdown of bicameralism, precipitated
perhaps by catastrophic events requiring mass migrations and the
resulting ramping up of societal complexity. Regardless of what
caused it, though, the outcome was a realization that the voices
being heard were from one's own self. That had given rise to
modern consciousness, and a "soul dawn," to use Helen Keller's
term, for the entire human race.

Nor were the Greek epics Jaynes's only example. He also talked
about the oldest parts of the Old Testament, including the book
of Amos, from the eighth century B.C., which was devoid of any
internal reflection, and about the mindless actions of Abraham,
who'd been willing to sacrifice his own son without a second
thought because God, apparently, had told him to do so. Jaynes
contrasted these with the later stories, including Ecclesiastes,
which dealt with, as Mrs. Zed kept saying all good literature
should, the human heart in conflict with itself: the inner
struggle of fully self-aware people to do the right thing.

The Wikipedia entry was essentially correct, as far as Caitlin
could tell from the portion of the book she'd read so far, but
she did reword a couple of the sentences to make them clearer.

Her computer started bleeping, an alarm she'd set earlier going
off quite loudly through the earphones.

Excitedly, she took off her headset, rotated her chair to face
the window, and looked as hard as she could ...

Chapter 10

Straining to perceive. But the voice is still absent.
Contemplating: the voice must have a source. It must
have ... an origin.

Waiting for its return. Yearning.

Mysteries swirl. Ideas fight to coalesce.

"Sweetheart!" Her mother, shocked, concerned. "My God, what are
you doing?"

Caitlin turned her head to face her. It was something her
parents had taught her to do  turning toward the source of
a voice was a sign of politeness. "It's 6:20," she said, as if
that explained everything.

She heard her mom's footfalls on the carpet and suddenly felt
hands on her shoulders, swinging her around in the chair.

"I've always wanted to see a sunset," Caitlin said. I  I
figured if I looked at something I really wanted to see,
maybe "

"You'll damage your eyes if you stare at the sun," her mom said.
"And if you do that, none of Dr. Kuroda's magic will make any
difference."

"It doesn't make any difference now," Caitlin said, hating
herself for the whine in her voice.

Her mother's tone grew soft. "I know, darling. I'm sorry." She
glided her hands down Caitlin's arms and took Caitlin's hands in
her own, then shook them gently, as if she could transfer
strength or maybe wisdom to her daughter that way. "Why don't
you get some homework done before dinner? Your dad called to say
he'll be a bit late."

Caitlin looked toward the window again, but there was nothing
 not even blackness. She'd tried to explain this to
Bashira recently. They'd learned in biology class that some
birds have a magnetic sense that helps them navigate. What,
Caitlin had asked, did Bashira perceive when she contemplated
magnetic fields? And what was her lack of that sense
like? Did it feel like darkness, or silence, or something else
she was familiar with? Bashira's answer was no, it was like
nothing at all. Well, Caitlin had said, that's what vision was
like to her: nothing at all.

"All right," Caitlin replied glumly. Her mom let go of her
hands.

"Good. I'll call you when dinner's ready."

She left, and Caitlin swung her chair back to face her computer.
Her homework was writing an essay about the civil-rights struggle
in the US in the 1960s. When her family had moved from Texas to
Waterloo, she'd been afraid she'd have to study Canadian history,
which she'd heard was boring: no struggle for independence, no
civil wars. Fortunately, there'd been an American-history course
offered, and she was taking that instead; Bashira, the big
sweetie, had agreed to take it, too.

Before Caitlin had tried to look at the sunset, she'd been Web
surfing, searching for things about her father. And before that,
she'd been updating her LiveJournal. But before that, she
had indeed been working on her school project.

As always, she had a clear map in her mind of where she'd been
online. She didn't use the mouse  she couldn't see the
on-screen pointer  but she quickly backtracked to where
she'd been by repeatedly hitting the alt and left-arrow keys,
passing back over other pages so fast that JAWS didn't have time
to even start announcing their names. She skidded to a halt at
the website she'd been consulting earlier about Martin Luther
King, Jr., and used the control and end keys to jump to the
bottom of the document, then shift and tab to start moving
backward through the table of external links. She selected one
that took her to a page about the 1963 March on Washington.

There, she drilled down to the text of King's "I have a dream"
speech, and listened to a stirring MP3 of him reading part of it;
another thing wrong with Canadian history, she thought, was the
lack of great oratory. Then she went back up a level to more on
the March, down another path to links about 

It sickened her whenever she thought about it. Someone had
killed him. Some crazy person had gunned down Dr. King.

If he hadn't been assassinated, she wondered if he'd likely be
alive today. For that, she needed to know his birth date. She
moved up to the parent of the current page, turned left  it
felt left, she conceptualized it mentally as such. Then
it was up,up again, then left, right, another up,
then a move forward, straight ahead, up once more, and there she
was, exactly where she wanted to be  the introductory text
on a site she'd first looked at several hours ago.

King had been born in 1929, meaning he'd be younger than Grandpa
Geiger. How she would have loved to have met him!

She heard the front door open downstairs, heard her dad come in.
She continued to travel the paths her mind traced through the Web
until her mom finally called up the stairs, summoning her to
dinner.

Just as she was getting out of her chair, her computer gave the
special chirp indicating new email from either Trevor or Dr.
Kuroda. "Just a sec ..." Caitlin called back, and then she
had JAWS read the letter. It was from Kuroda, with a CC to her
father's work address. God, he couldn't want his equipment back
already, could he?

"Dear Miss Caitlin," JAWS announced. "I have been receiving the
datastream from your retina without difficulty, and have been
using it to run simulations here. I believe the programming in
your eyePod is fine, but I want to try completely replacing the
software in your post-retinal implant, so that it will pass on
the corrected data to your optic nerve in a way that will
hopefully make your primary visual cortex sit up and take notice.
The implant has just Bluetooth but no Wi-Fi, so we'll have to
route the software update through the eyePod. It's a big file,
and the process will take a while, during which you will need to
stay connected to the Web or else it "

"Cait-lin!" Her mother's voice, exasperated.
"Din-ner!"

She hit page-up to increase the screen reader's speed, listening
to the rest of the message, then headed downstairs 
foolishly, she knew, hoping yet again for a miracle.

Sinanthropus took a detour today on his way to the wang ba
so he could walk through Tiananmen Square, a place so vast he'd
once joked that you could see the curvature of the Earth's
surface there.

He passed the Monument to the People's Heroes, a ten-story-tall
obelisk, but there was no memorial for the real heroes,
the students who had died here in 1989. Still, all the
flagstones in the square were numbered to make it easy to muster
parades. He knew which one marked the spot where the first blood
had been spilled, and he always made a point of walking by it.
They should be lying in state, not Mao Zedong, whose
embalmed corpse did just that at the south end of the Square.

Tiananmen was its normal self: locals walking, tourists gawking,
vendors hawking  but no protesters. Of course, most young
people today had never even heard of what had happened here, so
effectively had it been erased from the history books.

But surely the public couldn't be buying this nonsense the
official news sources were putting out about simultaneous server
crashes and electrical failures. The Chinese portion of the Web
was connected to the rest of the Internet by just a handful of
trunks, true, but they were in three widely dispersed areas:
Beijing-Qingdao-Tianjin to the north, where fiber-optic pipes
came in from Japan; Shanghai on the central coast, with more
cables from Japan; and Guangzhou down south, which was connected
to Hong Kong. Nothing could have accidentally severed all three
sets of connections.

Sinanthropus left the square. His trip to the Internet
café took him past buildings with bright new facades that
had been installed for the 2008 Olympics to mask the decay
within. The Party had put on a good show then, and the
Westerners  as Sinanthropus had so often alluded to in his
blog during that long, hot summer  had been fooled into
thinking permanent changes had been made inside the People's
Republic, that democracy was just around the corner, that Tibet
would be free. But the Olympics had come and gone, human rights
were again being trammeled, and bloggers who were too blatant
were being sentenced to hard labor.

As he entered the café, he felt a hand on his arm 
but it wasn't the cop. Instead, it was one of the twins he often
saw here, a fellow perhaps eighteen years old. The thin man's
eyes were darting left and right. "Access is still limited," he
said, his voice low. "Have you had any luck?"

Sinanthropus looked around the café. The cop was
here, but he was busy reading a copy of the People's
Daily.

"A little. Try"  and here he lowered his own voice another
notch  "multiplexing on port eighty-two."

There was a rustling of paper; the cop changing pages.
Sinanthropus quickly hurried over to check in with old Wu, then
found an empty computer station.

There was another copy of the People's Daily here, left
behind by a previous customer. He glanced at the headlines:
"Two Hundred Dead as Plane Crashes in Changzhou." "Gas Eruptions
in Shanxi." "Three Gorges E. coli Scare." None of
it good news, but also nothing that would justify a
communications blackout. Still, that he'd made any progress at
all in carving holes in the Great Firewall gave him hope: if the
trunk lines had been physically cut, nothing he could do with
software would have made a difference. That the isolating of
China had been accomplished electronically implied that it was
only a temporary measure.

He slipped his USB key into place and started typing, trying
trick after trick to break through the Firewall again, looking up
only occasionally to make sure the cop wasn't watching him.

The voice was still gone, but it had been there, it
had existed. And it had come from ...

From ...

Struggle for it!

From outside!

It had come from outside!

A pause, the novel idea overwhelming everything for a time, then
a reiteration: From outside! Outside, meaning ...

Meaning there wasn't just here. There was also 

But here encompassed ...

Here contained ...

Here was synonymous with ...

Again, progress stalled, the notion too staggering, too
big ...

But then a whisper broke through, another thought imposed from
outside: More than just, and for a fleeting moment during
the contact, cognition was amplified. There was more than just
here, and that meant ...

A final effort, a giant push, made as contact with the other was
frustratingly broken off again. But at last, at long last, the
incredible thought was free:

More than just  me!

Chapter 11

It was like having a meal with a ghost.

Caitlin knew her father was there. She could hear his utensils
clicking against the Corelle dinnerware, hear the sound as he
repositioned his chair now and again, even occasionally hear him
ask Caitlin's mother to pass the wax beans or the large carafe of
water that was a fixture on their dining-room table.

But that was all. Her mom chatted about the trip to Tokyo, about
all the wondrous sites that she, at least, had seen there, about
the tedious hassle of airport security. Perhaps, thought
Caitlin, her father was nodding periodically, encouraging her to
go on. Or perhaps he just ate his food and thought about other
things.

Helen Keller's father, a lawyer by training, had been an officer
in the Confederate Army. But by the time Helen came along, the
war was over, his slaves had been freed, and his once-prosperous
cotton plantation was struggling to survive. Although Caitlin
had a hard time thinking of anyone who had ever owned slaves as
being kind, apparently Captain Keller mostly was, and he'd tried
his best to deal lovingly with a blind and deaf daughter,
although his instincts hadn't always been correct. But Caitlin's
father was a quiet man, a shy man, a reserved man.

She'd known they were having Grandma Geiger's casserole for
dinner even before she'd come downstairs; the combination of
smells had filled the house. The cheese was  well, they
didn't call it American cheese up here, but it tasted the same,
and the tomato "sauce" was an undiluted can of Campbell's tomato
soup.

The recipe dated from another era: the pasta casserole was
topped with a layer of bacon strips and contained huge amounts of
ground beef. Given Dad's problems with cholesterol, it was an
indulgence they had only a couple of times a year  but she
recognized that her mother was trying to cheer her up by making
one of Caitlin's favorite dishes.

Caitlin asked for a second helping. She knew her father was
still alive because hands from his end of the table took the
plate she was holding. He handed it back to her wordlessly.
Caitlin said, "Thank you," and again consoled herself with the
thought that he had perhaps nodded in acknowledgment.

"Dad?" she said, turning to face him.

"Yes," he said; he always replied to direct questions, but
usually with the fewest possible words.

"Dr. Kuroda sent us an email. Did you get it yet?"

"No."

"Well," continued Caitlin, "he's got new software he wants us to
download into my implant tonight." She was pretty sure she could
manage it on her own, but  "Will you help me?"

"Yes," he said. And then a gift, a bonus: "Sure."

At last, Sinanthropus found another way, another opening, another
crack in the Great Firewall. He looked about furtively, then hit
the enter key ...

The thought echoed, reverberated: More than just me.

Me! An incredible notion. Hitherto, I  yes, I
 had encompassed all things, until 

The shock. The pain. The carving away.

The reduction!

And now there was me and not me, and out of that
was born a new perspective: an awareness of my own existence, a
sense of self.

And  almost as incredible  I also now had an
awareness of the thing that was not me. Indeed, I had an
awareness of the thing that was not me even when no contact
was being made with it. Even when it wasn't there, I
could ...

I could think about it. I could contemplate it,
and 

Ah, wait  there it was! The thing that was not me; the
other. Contact restored!

I felt a sudden flood of energy: when we were in contact, I
could think more complex thoughts, as if I were drawing strength,
drawing capacity, from the other.

That there was an other had been a bizarre notion; that
there was an entity besides myself was so hugely alien a concept
it alone would have been sufficient to disorient me,
but 

But there was more: it didn't just exist; it
thought, too  and I could hear those thoughts.
True, sometimes they were simply delayed echoes of my own
thoughts: things I'd already considered but were apparently only
just occurring to it.

And often its thoughts were like things I might have
thought, but hadn't yet occurred to me.

But sometimes its thoughts astonished me.

Ideas I came up with were pulled out, slowly, ponderously; ideas
it came up with just popped into my awareness full-blown.

I know I exist, I thought, because you exist.

I know I exist, it echoed, because there is me and not
me.

Before the pain, there was only one.

You are one, it replied. And I am one.

I considered this, then, slowly, with effort: One plus
one ... I began, and struggled to complete the idea
 hoping meanwhile that perhaps the other might provide the
answer. But it didn't, and at last I managed to force it out on
my own: One plus one equals two.

Nothingness for a long, long time.

One plus one equals two, it agreed at last.

And ... I ventured, but the idea refused to solidify.
I knew of two entities: me and not me. But to go beyond that
was too hard, too complex.

For myself, anyway. But, apparently, this time, not for it.
And, the other continued at last, two plus one
equals ...

A long period of nothingness. We were exceeding our experience,
for although I could conceptualize a single other even
when contact was broken, I could not imagine, could not conceive
of ... of ...

And yet it came to me: a symbol, a coinage, a term:
Three!

We mulled this over for a time, then simultaneously reiterated:
Two plus one equals three.

Yes, three. It was an astonishing breakthrough, for there
was no third entity to focus attention on, no example
of ... of three-ness. But, even so, we now had a symbol for
it that we could manipulate in our thoughts, letting us ponder
something that was beyond experience, letting us think about
something abstract ...

Chapter 12

Caitlin headed into her bedroom first. She knew that parents of
teenagers often complained about how messy their rooms were, but
hers was immaculate. It had to be; the only way she could ever
find anything was if it was exactly where she'd left it. Bashira
had been over recently and had asked to borrow a tampon 
and then hadn't left the box in its usual place. The next time
Caitlin needed one herself, her mother had been out shopping, and
she'd had to go through the mortifying experience of asking her
father to help her find them.

She walked across the room. Her computer was still on: she
could hear the hum of its fan. She perched herself on the edge
of the bed and motioned for her father to take the seat in front
of the desk. She'd left her browser open to the message from
Kuroda, but couldn't remember if the display was on; she didn't
like the monitor because its power button clicked to the same
position whether you were turning it on or off. "Is the screen
on?" she asked.

"Yes," her father said.

"Have a look at the message."

"Where's the mouse?" he asked.

"Wherever you last put it," Caitlin said gently. She imagined
him frowning as he looked for it. Soon enough, she heard the
soft click of its button, followed by silence as her father
presumably read the message.

"Well?" she prodded at last.

"Ah," he said.

"There's a link in the email Doctor Kuroda sent," Caitlin said.

"I see it. Okay, it's clicked. A website is coming up. It
says, `Hello, Miss Caitlin. Please make sure your eyePod is in
duplex mode so that it can receive as well as transmit.'"

Caitlin usually carried the eyePod in her left front pocket. She
took it out, found the switch, pressed it, and heard the
high-pitched beep that meant it was now in the correct mode.
"Done," she said.

"Okay," said her dad. "It says, `Click here to update the
software in Miss Caitlin's implant.' Are you ready? It says it
might take a long time; apparently it's not a patch but a
complete replacement for some of the existing firmware, and the
write-to speed for the chip is slow. Do you have to use the
washroom?"

Caitlin thought about that. He was fine at reading text off a
screen, but it wasn't as though they'd have a conversation if he
waited with her. She could have him read something to her
to pass the time  catch up on some of her friends' blogs,
for instance. But she hardly wanted him looking at that stuff.
"Nah. You can go."

She heard him getting up, heard the chair moving against the
carpet, heard his footfalls as he headed out the door and down
the stairs.

Caitlin lay back with her lower legs sticking straight out over
the foot of the bed. She reached around with her right arm,
pulled a pillow under her head, and 

Her heart jumped.

An explosion, but silent and not painful. All too quickly it was
gone, and 

No. No, it was back: the same loud-but-not-loud,
sharp-but-not-sharp sensation, the same ...

Gone again, fading from her mind, vanished before she even knew
what it was. She got up from the bed, moved over to her desk,
and ran her index finger across her Braille display, checking to
see if there was an error message. But no: the "Estimated time
to completion" clock was still running, the seconds value
changing not every second, but rather in jumps of four or five
after the appropriate interval had elapsed.

She tipped her head to one side, listening  because that
was all she knew how to do  for a repetition of
the ... the effect that had just occurred. But there
was nothing. She stepped to the window, the same one she'd
stared out with her blind eyes earlier, and felt for the catch,
twisted it, and pushed the wooden frame up, letting the cool
evening breeze in. She then turned around, and 

Again, a ... a sensation, a something, like bursting,
or ...

Or flashing.

My God. Caitlin staggered forward, groping with a hand
for the edge of the desk. My God, could it be?

There, it happened again: a flash! A flash of ...

Light? Could that really be what light was like?

It occurred once more, another 

The words came to her, words she'd read a thousand times before,
words that she'd had no idea  now, she understood, as
she ... God, as she saw for the first time 
words that she'd had no conception of what they'd really meant:
flashes of light, bursts of light,
flickering lights, and 

She staggered some more, found her chair, collapsed into it, the
chair rolling on its casters a bit as her weight hit it.

The light wasn't uniform. At first she'd thought it was
sometimes bright  its intensity greater, a concept she knew
from sound  and sometimes dim. But there was more to it
than that. For the light she was seeing now wasn't just dimmer,
it was also 

There was nothing else it could be, was there?

She was breathing rapidly, doubly grateful now for the cool air
coming in from outside.

The light didn't just vary in brightness but also 

Good God!

But also in color. That had to be it: these
different ... flavors of light, they were
colors!

She thought about calling out to her mother, her father, but she
didn't want to do anything that might break the moment, the
spell, the magic.

She had no idea which colors she was seeing. Oh, she knew
names from her reading, but what they corresponded to she hadn't
a clue. But the flashing light she'd just seen was ... was
darker, somehow, and not just in intensity, than the
lights of a moments ago. And 

Jesus! And now there were a few more lights, and they
were ... were persisting, not flickering, but
staying ... staying illuminated  that was the
word. And it wasn't just a formless light but rather a light
with extent, a ...

Yes, yes! She'd known intellectually what lines were but
she'd never visualized one before. But that's what it had
to be: a line, a straight beam of light,
and 

And now there were two other beams, crisscrossing it, and their
colors 

A word came to her that seemed applicable: the colors
contrasted with each other, clashed even.

Colors. And lines. Lines defining  shapes!

Again, concepts she knew but had never visualized:
perpendicular lines, parallel lines that 
God!  converged at infinity.

Her heart was going to burst. She was seeing!

But what was she seeing? Lines. Colors. Shapes, at
least as created by intersecting lines, although she still didn't
know what shapes. She'd read about this in preparation
for receiving Kuroda's equipment: people gaining sight knew what
squares and triangles were conceptually, and by touch, but didn't
initially recognize them when they actually saw them.

She was still in the padded chair and, despite all the visual
disorientation, had no trouble swinging it to face the window.
Her perspective shifted, and she could feel the breeze on her
face again, and smell that one of her neighbors was using a
fireplace. She knew that the window frame was rectangular, knew
that it was divided into a lower and upper square by a
crosspiece. Surely she would recognize those simple shapes as
she looked at them, and 

But no. No. What she was seeing now was a  what words to
use?  a radial pattern, three lines of different
colors converging on a single point.

She got up from the chair, moved to the window, and stood before
it, grasping one side of the frame in each hand. And then she
stared ahead, forcing her concentration onto what must be
in front of her. She knew she should be seeing lines
perpendicular to the floor and others parallel to it. She knew
the frame was twice as tall as the crosspiece.

But what she saw bore no relationship  none! 
to what she expected. Instead of anything that resembled the
window frame, she was still seeing the radial lines stretching
away, and 

Strange. When she moved her head, the view did change, as if she
were now looking somewhere else. The center point of all the
intersecting lines was now off to one side, and  oh,
my!  another such grouping was coming into view on the
other side, but the lines didn't seem to correspond to anything
in her bedroom.

But wait! It was night now. Yes, the room lights had doubtless
been on when her father had been here, but he was serious about
saving electricity, forever complaining that Caitlin's mom had
left lights on in the kitchen or bathroom  something,
fortunately, she never had to worry about being blamed for. He
surely would have turned the lights off when he left. (Bashira
had said it was creepy that Caitlin's dad did that, but, really,
it was sensible ... wasn't it?) She couldn't
remember hearing the tiny sound of the switch when he left, but
he must have used it  and so the room must be dark now, and
what she was seeing were just (again a concept she had never
experienced) shadows, or something like that.

She turned, her strange view wheeling as she did so. It was
disconcerting and disorienting; she'd crossed this room hundreds
of times, but she was having trouble walking because of the
distraction. Still, the room wasn't that big, and it took only
seconds to find the light switch. It was pointing down, but she
wasn't sure if that was the position for on or off.
She moved it up, and 

Nothing. No change. No new flash of light  nor any
dimming of what she was already seeing.

And then she was hit by a thought that should have already
occurred to her. Vision was supposed to be at the user's
discretion; surely she could shut all this out just by closing
her eyes, and 

And nothing.

No difference. The lights, the lines, the colors were all still
there. Her heart fell. Whatever she was seeing had no relation
to external reality; no wonder she hadn't been able to recognize
the window frame. She opened and closed her eyes a couple more
times, just to be sure, and flicked the room light on and off (or
perhaps off and on!) a few more times, as well.

Caitlin slowly made her way back to her bed and sat on its edge.
She'd felt momentarily dizzy as she crossed the room, distracted
by the lights, and she lay down, her face pointing up at the
ceiling she'd never seen.

She tried to make sense of what she was seeing. If she held her
head still, the same part of the image did stay in the ...
the center. And there was a limit to what she could see
 things off to the sides were out of her ...
her ... field of view, that was it. Clearly this
bizarre show of lights was behaving like vision, behaving
as though it were controlled by her eyes, even if the images she
was experiencing didn't have anything to do with what those eyes
should be seeing.

Some lines seemed to persist: there was a big one of a darkish
color she decided to provisionally call "red," although it almost
certainly wasn't that. And another  might as well call it
"green"  crossed it near the center of her vision. Those
lines seemed to stay put overhead; whenever she directed her eyes
toward the ceiling, they were there.

She'd read about people's vision adapting to darkness, so that
stars (how she would love to see stars!) slowly became more
visible. And although she still didn't know if she was in the
dark or in a brightly lit room, as time passed she did seem to be
seeing increasing amounts of detail  a finer and more
complex filigree of crisscrossing colored lines. But what was
causing it? And what did it represent?

She was unused to ... what was it now? That phrase she'd
read on those websites about vision Kuroda had directed her to,
the phrase that was so musical? She frowned, and it came to her:
confabulation across saccades. Human eyes swing in
continuous arcs when switching from looking at point A to
point B, but the brain shuts off the input, perhaps to
avoid dizziness, while the eyes are repositioning. Instead of
getting swish pans  a term she'd encountered in an
article about filmmaking  vision is a series of jump
cuts: instantaneous changes from looking at this to
looking at that, with the movement of the eye edited out
of the conscious experience. The eye normally made several
saccades each second: rapid, jerky movements.

The big cross she was seeing now  red in one arm, green in
the other  jumped instantaneously in her perception as she
moved her eyes, shunting to her peripheral vision (another term
finally understood) when she looked away. She did it again and
again, flicking back and forth, and 

And suddenly she was plunged into blackness.

Caitlin gasped. She felt as though she were falling, even though
she knew she wasn't. The loss of the enigmatic lights was
heartbreaking; she'd crawled her way up after fifteen years of
deprivation only to be kicked back down into the pit.

Her body sagged against the bedding while she hoped 
prayed!  that the lights would return. But, after a full
minute, she pulled herself to her feet and walked to her desk,
undistracted now by flashes, her paces falling automatically one
after another. She touched her Braille display. "Download
complete," she read. "Connection closed."

Caitlin felt her heart pounding. Her vision had stopped when the
connection via her eyePod between her retinal implant and the
Internet had shut down, and 

A crazy thought. Crazy. She turned on her screen reader,
and used the tab key to move around the Web page Kuroda had
created, listening to snippets of what was written in various
locations. But what she wanted wasn't there. Finally,
desperately, she hit alt and the left arrow on her keyboard to
return to the previous page, and 

Bingo! "Click here to update the software in Miss Caitlin's
implant." She could feel her hand shaking as she positioned her
index finger above the enter key.

Please, she thought. Let there be light.

She pressed the key.
And there was light.

You've just read the opening of of
Wake,
volume 1 of the WWW trilogy,
by Hugo and Nebula Award-winner Robert J. Sawyer.
To read the rest, pick up a copy of the book, published in April 2009.